TABLE OF CONTENTS We have repeated throughout this book that understanding the common features of good solutions is crucial to the enhancement of creativity. One obvious conclusion is to simply make a list of the most important features and then use the list for generating bright ideas and successful products.
Good generic solutions across industries have been studied as part of the development of TRIZ. Altshuller and his researchers collected examples of repeated use of the same solutions from patent information. After painstaking work, the information on tens of thousands of good solutions was boiled down to 40 principles in the early 1970s. [1] The use of these principles of innovation became an important branch of the theory. Various collections of standard solutions and principles for innovations were developed. To learn more about the research, see Savransky's book [2] and the paper by Zlotin and Zusman. [3]
Our goal in this chapter is to present the modern list of 40 principles as a problem-solving tool that is effective, easy to use, cheap and accessible to everybody. The 40 principles are the most popular tool of TRIZ and several books and many articles are devoted to them. This version has three main features:
All examples are new. They are mainly examples of innovations or realized solutions that are actually used in everyday life.
Most principles are illustrated with examples from both business and technology.
The principles are presented in a compact form, without division to subprinciples, as in early books. One...
