Method for Transferring the 40 Inventive Principles to Information Technology and Software

Abstract

The 40 Inventive Principles are one of the best known and most used tools of TRIZ. Originally, the 40 Inventive Principles were focused on solving problems of physics and chemistry. Caused by the increasing impact of software solutions, there were some activities in searching for analogies of the 40 Principles in software environments since the year 2000. Unfortunately, these efforts only had limited success. TRIZ and software is a difficult topic until today.This paper takes a look at past searches for software analogies of the 40 Principles. As a result, the creation of analogies is regarded as very useful. In the past, the analogies were limited to one-to-one transfers and new examples for the existing 40 Principles. But information technology is very different from physics and chemistry. This causes lateral thinking to be necessary when applying the current analogies of the Inventive Principles, thus often reducing quality and number of the ideas found. For avoiding lateral thinking, the transfer of the Inventive Principles to information technology has to be done in a more flexible way.For achieving this objective, information technology is separated into its three characteristics: objects, data, and algorithms. In the first step, each original Principle is applied to each of these three characteristics. Then, all results are put together. In the second step, the found results are put back into groups based on the original Principles. Thereby, groups are created, dropped, modified, or split. Thus, the new groups can be very different in comparison to the original Inventive Principles. Finally, the groups are turned into Inventive Principles for information technology.