Late as usual. I’m writing a paper for the big Sustainable Innovation conference in March. Before I start assembling all the intended content, I thought it might be a good idea to read the referees’ comments on my abstract. It turned out not to be. Unless the aim was to make me laugh out loud.

The reviewers are – I think – supposed to be anonymous, but one of them had magically managed to identify themselves by ‘suggesting’ that my paper might like to refer to and build from some of their previous work. I’m not sure this is totally ethical, but seems about par for academia these days, so, what the hell, I thought I’d take a look at the hyperlink they kindly included in their review. You can take a look yourself here at http://english.cas.cn/bcas/2018_2/201809/P020180905630348554064.pdf. If you’re in any way associated with TRIZ, you might like to take a few deep breaths before you click. The ‘paper’ is a fairly overt advertisement for a ‘new’ branch of science the authors label mesoscience. The culmination of the ‘paper’s content is this picture:

Its hypothesis is that if the world chose to look across all of the various scientific disciplines, maybe there may be some common principles. If you didn’t laugh you’d cry.

I usually tend to veer in the ‘laugh’ direction when encountering this kind of stuff. In this case, however, an earlier section of the ‘paper’ had speculated that ‘compromise in competition’ was one of the common principles. The point got reinforced by this graphic:

The bit I like best is the ‘at least three regimes’ comment. The graph plots the three regimes, but chooses not to plot the only one that’s important.

TRIZ, of course, has spent the last 70+ years doing precisely what the mesoscience ‘paper’ calls for. ‘Someone somewhere already solved your problem’ is one of the main findings. Meaning that there are very clearly a number of cross-domain common principles. One of which is very definitely that compromise is not a good thing. Compromise in competition is called, by other academic charlatans that also don’t understand how the world works, ‘red ocean’ territory. When we compromise, we end up with a bloodbath where nobody wins. Success is all about creating ‘blue oceans’ and the way this is done is by solving contradictions. So that everyone can win.

Funny how academics extolling the need for looking across domains – and supposedly, if I can believe their ‘paper’, have been at it for coming on 60 years – have a) failed to find TRIZ, and b) failed to identify that compromise is completely not a ‘common principle’ but rather a common mistake.

Thinking about it, maybe they did find TRIZ and realised it was safer to pretend they hadn’t. Acknowledging someone somewhere had already solved their problem likely as not meant no more grant money. And a need to engage their brain and go find a new question to go work on. Like I said, if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry. Academic crocodile tears.