Ever since the early 1970s when Genrich Altshuller declared there should be no more work on the tool, the Contradiction Matrix has polarized the TRIZ community. In the East, and particularly with TRIZniks from the original former Soviet countries, the heart of the polarization can be seen with the frequent attempts to rubbish any attempt to update the tool.
‘Don’t touch TRIZ’ has long been a battle cry of the TRIZ traditionalists. But then at the same time, if we look at the curriculum of any TRIZ education programme it inevitably contains a significant portion devoted to the original Altshuller Matrix. So what we end up with are great numbers of people being taught how to use a tool that everyone in the TRIZ world knows is outdated and more often than not points users towards solutions that are either irrelevant or, worse, entirely inappropriate. Or, put another way, if you use a 1970s tool, you shouldn’t be too surprised to get a 1970s answer.
In the West, the polarization usually takes a different form. If there are only 40 Inventive Principles, the argument goes, why bother with the tedious task of looking up numbers in the Matrix? On one hand there is a lot to be said for this approach: for a team working on a real problem, one might rightfully say, it would be foolish for them not to examine all of the Principles to see how they might contribute to the eventual solution. On the other hand, there is a growing demand for efficiency in the innovation process. And, whichever way we look at it, randomly brainstorming through 40 Inventive Principles is not efficient.
It’s inefficient on two counts; firstly it means we spend less time thinking about what the contradiction we want to solve really is. This means we’re less likely to find ourselves working on the ‘right’ problem. And spending time working on the wrong problem is about as inefficient as it is possible to get.
Secondly, when we do use the Matrix its main job is to provide us with a ranked list of Principles that we can systematically apply to our problem. The key word here being ‘ranked’. The current version of the Matrix we’ve built to tackle technical problems now benefits from over five million case-study data points. This means that when the Matrix tells us that an Inventive Principle is the most frequently used Principle to solve our chosen problem, it means that literally tens of thousands of people have used precisely that Principle to solve the problem. Not to mention the four billion years of biological evolution that our research has also reverse-engineered and added to the tool.
The Systematic Innovation research team continues to devote significant time and energy to updating the Matrix. In a typical month, thanks to the advent of smart contradiction-finding software tools, we’re able to analyse several thousand new patents and academic journal papers, find the contradictions, reverse engineer how they have been solved and add the findings to the Matrix. We do that because we spend most of our time working for clients that are serious about innovation, clients that know it’s more important to find the right problem and deliver the best solution than it is to tell the world about how they did it. The current and all of our future Matrix tools are developed with these serious users in mind.
Efficiency looks set to be the dominant innovation driver in the next ten years. And yet, somehow, TRIZ usage is currently on the decline in many parts of the world. Herein lies another intriguing paradox: how can it be that the methodology that has the most to contribute to efficient problem definition and solving is being used less and less?
Whether TRIZ will survive into the future probably has much to do with the aforementioned polarisations and paradoxes and how well they get solved. If, indeed, they do ever get solved. Another odd aspect of the TRIZ community is that it often seems reluctant to apply its own tools to the problems it encounters. One thing is clear, however, and that is if the TRIZ community is to turn around the current decline, it needs to grow the community of invisible serious users and help them increase the rate of tangible, visible, success stories. Hopefully using tools – like the latest Contradiction Matrix – designed to deliver useful outcomes.