TRIZ for Engineers: Enabling Inventive Problem Solving E-Book

Karen Gadd

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 730

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

TRIZ is a brilliant toolkit for nurturing engineering creativity and innovation. This accessible, colourful and practical guide has been developed from problem-solving workshops run by Oxford Creativity, one of the world's top TRIZ training organizations started by Gadd in 1998. Gadd has successfully introduced TRIZ to many major organisations such as Airbus, Sellafield Sites, Saint-Gobain, DCA, Doosan Babcock, Kraft, Qinetiq, Trelleborg, Rolls Royce and BAE Systems, working on diverse major projects including next generation submarines, chocolate packaging, nuclear clean-up, sustainability and cost reduction.

Engineering companies are increasingly recognising and acting upon the need to encourage successful, practical and systematic innovation at every stage of the engineering process including product development and design. TRIZ enables greater clarity of thought and taps into the creativity innate in all of us, transforming random, ineffective brainstorming into targeted, audited, creative sessions focussed on the problem at hand and unlocking the engineers' knowledge and genius to identify all the relevant solutions.

For good design engineers and technical directors across all industries, as well as students of engineering, entrepreneurship and innovation, TRIZ for Engineers will help unlock and realise the potential of TRIZ. The individual tools are straightforward, the problem-solving process is systematic and repeatable, and the results will speak for themselves.

This highly innovative book:

• Satisfies the need for concise, clearly presented information together with practical advice on TRIZ and problem solving algorithms
• Employs explanatory techniques, processes and examples that have been used to train thousands of engineers to use TRIZ successfully
• Contains real, relevant and recent case studies from major blue chip companies
• Is illustrated throughout with specially commissioned full-colour cartoons that illustrate the various concepts and techniques and bring the theory to life
• Turns good engineers into great engineers.

Leseprobe

TRIZ For Engineers:

Enabling Inventive Problem Solving

This edition first published 2011

© 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Gadd, Karen.

 TRIZ for engineers : enabling inventive problem solving / Karen Gadd.

p. cm.

 Includes index.

 ISBN 978-0-470-74188-7 (cloth)

1. TRIZ theory. 2. Inventions. 3. Engineering–Methodology. 4. Problem solving–Methodology. I. Title.

 T212.G33 2011

 620.0028–dc22

2010034198

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN pbk: 9780470741887

ISBN ePDF: 9780470684337

ISBN oBook: 9780470684320

ISBN epub: 9780470975435

About the Author

Karen Gadd has been teaching TRIZ and problem solving with engineering teams from major companies for over 13 years. Her mission is to make TRIZ learning straightforward and the TRIZ Tools easy to use. She has worked on nothing but TRIZ since discovering and learning its power to give us all the routes, to all the solutions, to all engineering problems.

In 1998 Karen started Oxford Creativity to concentrate on developing simple and practical TRIZ problem solving for the European market. Karen has taken TRIZ to major companies including Rolls-Royce, British Nuclear Group, Bentley Motors, BAE Systems, Nissan, Pilkington, Borealis and Sanofi Aventis. Oxford Creativity is now well established as one of the world’s top TRIZ companies and has helped to make TRIZ well known and widely used throughout Europe and encouraged top companies to create expert TRIZ teams for innovative problem solving.

Karen studied Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College, and has an MBA from London Business School. After working in strategy and corporate planning in the City of London she returned to live in Oxford and was a tutor at Oxford’s Business School the European School of Management ESCP-EAP (based in Paris, Oxford, Madrid and Berlin). From 1995–2002 she was a Governor of Coventry University. Karen’s career has been dedicated to creating new enterprises which make a difference – she founded both MUSIC at OXFORD and the European Union Baroque Orchestra and ran both for over ten years and raised millions in corporate sponsorship to make their activities possible. These successful music organisations still flourish. MUSIC at OXFORD transformed Oxford’s music scene and is now approaching its 30th season of top professional classical concerts. EUBO has celebrated 25 years of launching the careers of talented young musicians and has been so successful in its mission, that there are now former EUBO students in every major professional baroque ensemble in the world. Karen launched Oxford Creativity to make TRIZ accessible to everyone and transform and launch careers of TRIZ enthusiasts and champions. There are now thousands of engineers who have learned TRIZ from Karen and who intelligently daily apply TRIZ to solve difficult technical and scientific problems.

Karen is long married, has four children and three grandchildren and lives happily in Oxford and the Lake District. Karen has recently become a director of the Orchestra of St.John’s. Concerts and singing are still her interests and part of her activities, as well as speaking at conferences throughout the world on the success and power of TRIZ.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following people for their support and help.

My Managing Director and daughter, Lilly Haines-Gadd, for her unfailing enthusiasm, support, patience and encouragement.

My colleagues who have worked with me to create the simple approaches to TRIZ in this book – we have all learned from each other and I am grateful for all they have taught me – most especially Henry Strickland, Andrew Martin, Andrea Mica.

All those who have helped me put my ideas and TRIZ solutions into a form to communicate it to others. Merryn Haines-Gadd, our graphic designer, who turns my thoughts into pictures, and Eric Willner and Nicky Skinner of Wiley for their help, optimism and common sense advice and Caroline Davies of Oxford Creativity.

Our whole TRIZ community and all those who learned TRIZ from me and my colleagues, and who have joined us in our quest to make TRIZ accessible within their organisations and beyond, especially:

Frédéric Mathis (Mars), Ric Parker (Rolls-Royce), Dave Knott (Rolls-Royce), Pauline Marsh (BAE Systems), Simon Brodie (RAF) Mike West (Babcock), and Professor Derek Sheldon (Institution of Mechanical Engineers).

Those who have worked to bring TRIZ to the world and first introduced me to the power of its toolkit, most especially, Ellen Domb and Sergei Ikovenko.

My thanks to all the engineers who have taught me, inspired me and worked with me to solve problems with TRIZ. To all the TRIZ teams of engineers we have worked with (but we cannot name for security reasons) whose clever ideas during TRIZ sessions helped us to extend and develop our TRIZ thinking.

My own family of engineers: my father Kenneth Gadd who claims that as an old engineer (contemporary, but unknowing of Altshuller) he represents a generation whose engineering prowess was unmatched by any previous or succeeding generations. All my fellow Imperial College engineers, including my husband Geoff Haines (a middle-aged engineer) and to my son Jonathan Haines-Gadd (a young engineer), and those few members of my family who don’t yet work with TRIZ but who have supported me in my championship for such challenging causes – my mother Kathleen Gadd, my daughter Rebecca Haines-Gadd and my TRIZniks of the future, my grandchildren Isobelle, Livia and Freddie.

Most especially, the great Genrich Altshuller – my gratitude and respect for his extraordinary vision to uncover and summarise the world’s engineering genius grows with all the TRIZ work I undertake. I have returned to his source material at every stage of my learning, and I strive to merely interpret the power and logic of his TRIZ.

This is what I offer with this book, faithfulness to Altshuller’s TRIZ tools and I hope simple, clear innovative ways for understanding and using them. TRIZ requires both right (creative) and left (logical and systematic) sides of the brain to make it work. The only known way to join these two is with laugher and humour and the TRIZ cartoons attempt to achieve this. I have been assisted in this by the wonderful cartoonist Clive Goddard, who has worked with me to create TRIZ cartoons to help show just how much fun TRIZ offers. I hope we have succeeded.

Foreword

Since discovering TRIZ, Karen Gadd has been an enthusiastic, near-evangelical, promoter of the methodology. She has introduced this exciting modern approach to innovation to many companies, including my own, as well as countless individuals. I am very pleased that she has now captured the essence of TRIZ in this well-written and very readable book, with its colourful and amusing illustrations, making TRIZ accessible to an even wider audience.

TRIZ is a contradiction in terms: it is free thought by numbers; it is a top-down approach to lateral thinking; it is a structured approach to brainstorming. Emerging from post-cold-war Russia, TRIZ is based on an intense and systematic study of all the world’s great inventions. All of these can be broken down to be rendered as a combination of simple physical phenomena. There are actually relatively few conceptual solutions to problems (about 100) and 2,500 or so scientific principles. By presenting the designer, or inventor with novel (at times implausible) combinations of principles, new ways of solving problems can be discovered.

Look around you. Mix static electricity and photographic imaging and you have the instant, dry printing of the photo-copier. Mix suction and vortices with centrifugal force and you have the bag-less simplicity of the new generation of vacuum cleaners. The list is endless, as are the possibilities for new inventions.

We don’t realise how bounded are our conceptual spaces and how linear our thought processes. We are locked in by past experience, by ‘rules’ passed down by our teachers, by the ‘it’ll never work’ attitudes of those around us. It is far easier to suppress innovation than to stimulate it. If, like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, you sometimes believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast, you may be able to get by without TRIZ. Many seemingly impossible things are indeed impossible, but some are not. TRIZ will set you free to explore the world of the apparently impossible.

TRIZ is an essential part of the modern engineer’s or inventor’s tool kit. This book will not make you an expert overnight, but it will hopefully stimulate your interest and make you want to explore more deeply the world of TRIZ.

Professor Ric Parker, FREng

Director of Research and Technology

Rolls-Royce Group

Part One: TRIZ Logic and the Tools for Innovation and Clarity of Thought

TRIZ Tools for Creativity and Clever Solutions

What is TRIZ?

TRIZ is a unique, rigorous and powerful toolkit which guides engineers to understand and solve their problems by accessing the immense treasure of past engineering and scientific knowledge. TRIZ helps us find the surprisingly few relevant and practical answers to our real problems. This is made simple by the TRIZ summary of all the conceptual answers to engineering and scientific problems.

TRIZ is the only solution toolkit which exists so far in the world that offers engineers help beyond brainstorming at the actual concept–solution locating and problem solving moments. There are wonderful toolkits for understanding problems, with analysis processes for capturing the requirements, analysing the systems, looking at processes and pinpointing actual causes of problems. There are also many rigorous and useful toolkits for the time after problem solving has occurred, including processes for selecting solutions and developing them, with useful ways of evaluating and predicting costs etc.; but for the actual moment of problem solving – the search and capture of the right solutions or new concepts – there is only TRIZ. Until TRIZ the assumption has been that clever engineers and scientists would somehow find the right answers either individually or collectively by brainstorming and using their experience and knowledge.

BEFORE – Preparation for Problem SolvingTRIZ and other tool-kits for Requirements / needs capture System analysis Find any root causes of problems etc.DURING – Problem SolvingBrainwave ideas Brainstorming Creativity Tools and/or TRIZTRIZ Conceptual Solutions40 Principles 76 Standard Solutions 8 Trends all used with relevant World’s Knowledgeand TRIZ Creativity Toolsincluding – Ideal Solutions Smart Little People Size-Time-Cost etc.AFTER – Solution Selection and DevelopmentTRIZ and other Tool-kits for Concept development Concept selection process (such as Pugh Matrix) Successful innovation and new technologies etc.

Use all the available tools for each stage of problem solving

Before TRIZ no one had looked to systematically summarize all the published solutions to scientific and engineering problems and seek similarities, overlaps and patterns. When the founder of TRIZ, Altshuller, examined patent databases he found only 40 solutions to solving contradictions and a total of about 100 conceptual solutions for improving systems and solving problems which can be used together with the 2500 or so scientific and engineering theories (called effects in TRIZ) to solve problems. Together with his TRIZ community Altshuller developed TRIZ as the ‘science of creativity’ derived from all scientific and engineering success and offered a practical problem solving toolkit for engineering systems. The principal TRIZ tools direct us to find all the ways for improving and solving problems in existing systems and processes. They also help us find relevant concepts to develop the next-generation systems, and they offer systematic processes for inventing and developing new products. TRIZ has simple general concept lists to help us solve any problem; these TRIZ solution triggers are distilled from analysing all known published successful, scientific and engineering solutions. TRIZ tools are unique in their power for problem solving but TRIZ also offers simple tools for problem understanding, for system analysis, for understanding what we want, and for stimulating new ideas, creative thought and innovative solutions.