TRIZ
The mother of ASIT

The history of TRIZ is very much interwoven with the life of it's originator, so lets start by highlighting some of the main events in Altshuller's life. Since childhood, Altshuller showed his talents as an inventor. When he was just 15 years old he received his first patent for an underwater apparatus. In 1946, at the age of 20, he developed his first mature invention - a method for escaping from an immobilized submarine without diving gear. Soon Altshuller was offered employment in the patent department of the Soviet navy. Altshuller's job was to invent, and more importantly for the later development of TRIZ, to help others invent.

Faced with the challenge of inventing, time and again Altshuller searched scientific literature for some kind of a method for inventing, which he believed must have existed. To his disappointment he could not find any clues as to the existence of such a method. Altshuller came to the conclusion that he needed to develop such a method himself. He started off by examining a large database of his own and other people's inventions, and soon he arrived at his most important finding: Inventing is the removal of a contradiction with the help of certain principles. To develop a method for inventing, he argued, one must scan a large number of inventions, identify the contradictions underlying them, and formulate the principle used by the inventor for their removal.

Clarifications of the terms: Contradiction, Removal of Contradiction, Principle.

Before returning to Altshuller's amazing life story, let's briefly clarify the terms, contradiction, removal of a contradiction, and principle; as they are used in Altshuller's theory. A contradiction is a situation in which an improvement made in one feature of a system directly leads to the deterioration of another. For example, a contradiction appears in the design of a light bulb: if we improve energetic efficiency, we shorten the life span of the bulb. The common cure for a contradiction found in a system is compromise - finding the best trade-off between contradictory requirements. According to Altshuller, the removal of a contradiction means creating a better situation without resorting to a trade-off. In many cases, a contraction arises as a result of conflicting requirements from a certain physical property. For example, in the case of the light bulb, temperature must be very high to ensure efficiency and very low to ensure a longer life. Altshuller would state the problem as follows: How could the temperature be both high and low? (Instead of stating the common question about how to find the optimal temperature.)

To exemplify what Altshuller meant by "principle," let's view another example. When designing the space shuttle, NASA engineers faced a very difficult problem: during reentry, the shuttle's surface is heated by the earth's atmosphere. To protect the shuttle from overheating, its surface must be covered with a thick layer of protective material. But, that in turn increases the weight of the shuttle, and this is not acceptable. The contradiction here is clear: we need a protective layer that is both thick and thin. Eventually this problem was solved by using Altshuller's "taking out" principle, which means: trying to remove something from the system. The solution was to cover the shuttle with abrasive ceramic tiles. These tiles continually lose material and become thinner during the reentry process. The idea is that instead of fighting heat by trying to prevent it from reaching the shuttle's surface, the heated parts are simply removed.

Enthusiastic about the simple but powerful principles of invention that he discovered, Altshuller decided to send a letter to Stalin, the President of the USSR, to gain his support for his research. The letter was personally addressed to Comrade Stalin. In the letter, Altshuller pointed out that there was chaos and ignorance in the USSR's approach to innovation and inventing. Altshuller was not fully aware of Stalin's cruelty and therefore his arrest caught him by surprise. In the Moscow prison, Altshuller refused to sign a confession. In their attempts to try to break him, the KGB interrogated him during the night and did not allow him to sleep during the day. Altshuller decided to view even this harsh situation as a challenge to his theory of invention. He stated his problem as such: how can I sleep and not sleep at the same time? He was quick to come up with a solution: he tore two pieces of paper from a cigarette package and formed them into the shape of an eye. With a charred match, he drew the pupil of an eye on each piece of paper. His cellmate stuck these pieces of paper onto Altshuller's eyelids using his saliva. Altshuller then sat across from the cell door and calmly fell asleep. A year and a half after Stalin's death, Altshuller was released from prison and continued his research.

After studying more than 200,000 patents, Altshuller concluded that there are about 1,500 technical contradictions that can be resolved relatively easily by applying fundamental principles. "You can wait a hundred years for enlightenment or you can solve the problem in 15 minutes with these principles," he said.

TRIZ today

Since its early days TRIZ has developed into a very complex system of principles and tools. Many types of contradictions and principles that may be used to remove them were discovered by Altshuller and his descendants. TRIZ is currently very popular among engineers. There are TRIZ magazines, TRIZ conferences, TRIZ courses and TRIZ software. Some of these can be found in the links below.

How does ASIT differ from Triz?

Although SIT and TRIZ share common roots, SIT is much more user-friendly, quicker and easier to use.

ASIT can be learned easily and applied immediately. The method lends itself to rapid assimilation and quick application in industrial environments.

ASIT uses a minimal set of techniques - five universal techniques: Unification, Multiplication, Division, Breaking Symmetry and Object Removal. These techniques replace dozens of principles in TRIZ, so that after some training the ASIT process can become second nature to the problem solver.

The ASIT Closed World condition (that has no equivalent in TRIZ) keeps the problem solver firmly within the framework of truly creative ideas. It replaces the more cumbersome TRIZ notion of overcoming conflicts.

ASIT focuses on the cognitive aspects of problem solving: ASIT trainees and users actually become more creative and don't just learn new procedures by relying on memory rote as in TRIZ.

ASIT is a pure thinking method and does not include any domain-specific knowledge components such as TRIZ's list of physical effects.

ASIT for problem solving is an integral part of the Systematic Inventive Thinking approach to innovation and creativity, which also includes marketing, NPD and advertising.

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