Principle 3 Deep Dive

Darrell Mann

A couple of months ago we did an analysis on the case studies we’ve been involved with during the past few years. Projects that have either been our own, or ones where a client has asked us to … Read More

Worst Of 2017 Awards

Darrell Mann

Finding bad things to write about increasingly feels like shooting large fish in small barrels with large Howitzers. That said, 2017 felt a bit like a year of flux. The focus of the rubbish-ness is shifting. Customer service … Read More

Re-Thinking Physical Contradictions #1: Technical Problems

Darrell Mann

The least well evolved of all the TRIZ tools feels more and more like the Physical Contradiction story. The more time and energy we devote to updating the Contradiction Matrix tool, the more the Physical Contradiction part seems … Read More

Evolution Potential Hierarchies

Darrell Mann

Although widely established as a means of analyzing the maturity of a system, and for guiding the generation of future evolution direction ideas, there continues to be confusion over how to get the best out of the Evolution … Read More

COBRA+

Darrell Mann

Every business problem is inherently complex. And inherently needs to address intangible ‘emotion’ issues. Solving complex problems necessitates getting the problem back to a first principles level. The overall TRIZ, Systematic Innovation and TrenDNA processes are intended to … Read More

Case Study: B2B Intangibles

Darrell Mann

Everyone involved in the Business-to-Consumer world is at least beginning to understand the importance of designing for the unspoken intangible outcomes customers are looking for. A lot of times those in the B2B world still don’t get it. … Read More

The Morality Of Toast

Darrell Mann

I’ve known it for a while, of course. The main job of conferences is to make me angry. Great for sparking some deeper thinking, not so great for my mental health. Which is why I have to limit … Read More

I Want TRIZ To Be Easy And Difficult

Darrell Mann

I was reading ‘The Dumbest Generation’ (Reference 1) the other month. It’s about Generation Y. If the title suggests some kind of a sensationalist hatchet-job on the Millennials, it actually betrays the presence of some really quite deep … Read More

Biology – Electric Eel

Darrell Mann

From Nature last month, an article describing scientists’ search for safer, more natural ways to power devices that go into our bodies. Sticking toxic battery elements inside the body, and having to periodically replace them with invasive surgery … Read More

Case Studies: Milk-Shake

Darrell Mann

I read the latest Clayton Christensen book, Competing Against Luck, last month. In the fractured, fractious world of innovation, Christensen is one of the few ‘must-read’s. Even though an awful lot of his output is a re-hash of … Read More

Design Thinking – Philosophy, Method, Tool

Darrell Mann

There’s an old joke in the Six Sigma world. One of the founding fathers is on a panel at a conference. Alongside him is one of the founding fathers of the preceding Total Quality Management world. Questions are … Read More

Patent of the Month – Monocentric Lens

Darrell Mann

If I was a betting man, I’d say that this month’s patent of the month had the smell of TRIZ about it. US9,860,443 was granted to a trio of inventors at the University of California. Two of them … Read More

“A Good Question Is Worth A Thousand Answers”

Kobus Cilliers

This article is an expanded version of an interview conducted for Tata Review in December 2016. The official version can be found at the online Tata Review website: http://bitcast-a.v1.o1.bom1.bitgravity.com/tatas/ebook/tata-review-jan-2017/mobile/index.html#p=96)

Darrell Mann speaks at a speedy clip and … Read More

Start With Converge?

Darrell Mann

Things are always at their most interesting when we find contradictions. We’ve spent quite a bit of time trialling our COBRA+ process last year. We didn’t think about it at the time, but the first step in the … Read More

How to Invent Strong – A Framework

Navneet Bhushan

Abstract: One of the most important outputs of human mind has been continuous stream of inventions over many eras of civilization. However, human mind has been inventing using what is called “trial and error” methods on its evolutionary … Read More

Biology – Lobarina scrobiculata

Darrell Mann

The Lobaria scrobiculata lichen is unique. Unlike the majority of lichen with green microalgae, which use environmental humidity to activate their photosynthesis, this species requires liquid water in symbiosis to activate the cyanobacteria living in it. This makes … Read More

Patent of the Month – Smartphone Detection Of Vehicle Maneuvers

Darrell Mann

There’s an awful lot of talk these days about autonomous vehicles. A lot of it is naïve. We won’t all be driving around in autonomous vehicles in the next five years – or even ten – because there … Read More

Algorithm for choosing technical contradiction

Konstantin Chugunov

This article is Translated from Russian to English and both versions are published here.

1. Check whether there is no problem in most restrictions make it impossible to use one of the TA.

Note 1: Constraints … Read More

Analysis of TRIZ’s Invention Principles

Kotaro Kageyama

TRIZ, which was created by G. Altshuller and enhanced by many scholars and practitioners, has been used practically as “the scientific way of making inventions” all over the world.

In TRIZ, with the starting point of “Contradiction Matrix”, … Read More

S-Fields & System Evolution

Darrell Mann

Truth be told, I’m not the world’s biggest user of the S-Field tool. I find myself teaching it far more often than I am using it in anger. Partly, I think, because other tools have kind of superseded … Read More