TRIZ was originally developed as a tool for enhancing engineering creativity. As TRIZ evolved, it became clear to Genrikh Altshuller and his followers that its fundamental principles should be applicable to other human pursuits such as science, art and others (Altshuller, 1963, 1988b; Filkovsky, 1974). The idea was to apply the same approach used while developing TRIZ (i.e., treating all entities of study as evolving systems, accumulating a large database of “strong solutions”, formulating laws of evolution specific to that given class of entities, etc.) to analyze other evolving systems. Natural objects for such analysis would be the ones most closely related to technology – managerial and business systems. The following is an outline of TRIZ concepts and tools that might be used in business and organizational contexts.

Tools of TRIZ and management issues

There are many occurrences of the spontaneous use of the laws of evolution by businesses. For example, the law of increasing dynamism is manifested in such approaches as outsourcing, the postponing of product differentiation (delegation of final product assembly to dealers and distributors to reduce the delivery time with customer-required modifications and options [Davis and Sasser, 1995]), the use of flexible production systems (McGraw, 1996), the use of reconfigurable machining systems and modular tooling structures, and others.

Another business application of increasing dynamism is eloquently described: “Small jets are starting to do to the airline industry what PCs did to mainframe computing; fractional horsepower machines did to turbines; minimills did to steel; cellular is doing to telephony; mutual funds are starting to do to centrally managed corporate and government pension plans, and eventually will do to Social Security, and what coming; mini-generators will do to massive power plants – give customers more service, more flexibility, more control at less cost, as well as generate new products and services.