I-TRIZ Foundations

While innovation is a product of the human mind, we can't get inside the brain to study the innovation process. We can, however, examine the results of this activity by analyzing how technological systems evolve. The most fertile source of information for this purpose is the patent database.

The originator of TRIZ, Genrich Altshuller, began by screening approximately 200,000 patent abstracts. He soon discovered that fewer than 40,000 of these patents represented inventive solutions, and embarked on a rigorous analysis of this inventive subset. Four key findings resulted:

In the next few sections we will see how these findings form the foundation for I-TRIZ.