Determining Motivation And Strategy With The Triz Contradiction Matrix

Dr. Steven Young, Jr.
Special Applications Group
McDill AFD
Tampa, FL

Jack Hipple
Innovation-TRIZ
Tampa, FL

TRIZ has been used for decades to promote innovation across the spectrum of corporate and scientific interest. From (example) to (example), government, military, and private enterprises have used TRIZ to solve problems and enhance systematic creativity. Consider if a basic tool used by TRIZ could be implemented to understand and even forecast the technical and organizational innovations of others? The principles of strategic foresight mandate that any such opportunity must be seized. The universality and structured application of the TRIZ contradiction tables and principles in reverse offer just such a possibility. Prominent TRIZ authors have cited the usefulness and ready embrace of contradiction table and 40 principles by TRIZ practitioners. Darrel Mann states that the contradiction matrix is “strangely magnetic” (p. 214) to early TRIZ practitioners. This should come as no surprise, for as Terninko, Zusman, and Zlotin write “there are contradictions in all we see and in every thought that we have, but we do not explore them.” (p. 70) Mann states that once one studies the inventive principles, “you will begin to see it everywhere, in business situations, in biology, etc.” (p. 215) Terninko, Zusman and Zlotin add that the “40 principles have a remarkably broad range of application.” (p. 71) While further refinements of the contradiction table exist, the time-tested status of the matrix concept and the 40 inventive principles attest to the pioneering comprehensiveness of Altshuller’s work, in which over 400,000 patents were ultimately evaluated. Thus the principles and contradiction parameters are based on observed, recorded, and analyzed patterns of development and innovation. This face, together with their allure, suggest that the contradiction table and 40 principles serve as a pragmatic “good fit” for understanding the human creativity process in a systematic manner. Crucially, however, the contradiction-resolution use of the parameters to arrive at the principles can be reversed. Reversing the application of the contradiction-resolution table thereby allows us to investigate, anticipate, and –if-necessary- counter the emergent phenomena of development and innovation.

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