I am struggling to find the time to write my CMM column — I have been preoccupied with preparing to appear in front of a research grant-awarding panel to try and convince them to fund one of my pet projects. This ‘audition’ will require me to give a two-minute ‘elevator’ pitch about the project in addition to answering questions from the panel on any aspect of it.
The project is in the area of engineering innovation and creative problem solving, a subject in which I have teaching and research interests. I am proposing to create a tool to help engineers solve innovative engineering design problems and plan to base it on TRIZ, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving pioneered by the Soviet mechanical engineer Genrich Altshuller in the 1940s.
TRIZ first became known to the West after the end of the Cold War and has been adopted by many Fortune 500 companies as well as smaller firms. My colleagues and I have used it in a number of major innovation-focused projects since the late 1990s — “Innovative Manufacturing”, “Innovative Technologies for Effective Enterprises”, “Innovative Production Machines and Systems”, to name a few.
I have been teaching TRIZ-like techniques to research students for several years. This year, I will also introduce TRIZ as part of our design curriculum to give our undergraduates some systematic innovation skills. Although a comprehensive course on TRIZ would take days, due to time limitations, my introduction will be restricted to four hours, during which I will only be able to offer students a TRIZ taster.
The taster will cover the most important concepts and techniques of TRIZ: system and problem modelling, ideality, contradiction, resources, inventive principles, time and space separation, system evolution, thinking in time and scale, standard solutions and effects, and substance-field analysis.
Students will learn that non-routine design problems usually contain contradictions or conflicting requirements. For example, an industrial robot gripper must be light so as not to reduce the effective payload of the robot unduly. On the other hand, it must be strong in order to be able to hold the load securely. Given a certain gripper material, low weight requires using less of it and high strength implies the opposite.
In some cases, the problem can be solved by identifying and clearly formulating the contradiction. In other situations, to remove the contradiction, resources (information, energy, material) available in the environment must be employed.
As mechanical engineers, we are familiar with the idea of designing as involving trade-offs. However, TRIZ offers the possibility of producing ideal designs that do not require making any compromises. TRIZ techniques can be applied to solve problems where the requirement might be for something that is light AND heavy, large AND small, long AND short, etc.
The ideal solution in TRIZ is one that uses free resources to attain all the required functions while suffering from or causing no harmful effects. In the case of the robot gripper, the ideal solution might be to avoid the need for it altogether, for example, by employing part of the robot structure for gripping the workpiece. Thus, with TRIZ, as we approach ideality, it is possible to have our cake and eat it at the same time!
What about my audition? Well, I plan to use some of the content of this column in my two-minute pitch, hoping that the highly compressed explanation of TRIZ will make sense to the panel. There you are — another example of having one’s cake (writing this CMM column) and eating it (preparing for the audition)!