An analysis of the TRIZ creative method through a patents study

Abstract

This article discusses creativity, specifically, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ), as a methodology. It is an exploratory study based on a bibliometric analysis of patents. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed on these patents aiming to identify how TRIZ has been used in technological innovation and, specifically, to determine the existence of innovative contributions attributable to TRIZ. Initially, 57 patent documents available in the Espacenet database were analyzed; after separating, filtering, and normalizing, 27 documents remained. These documents were summarized, grouped into categories and analyzed in the following manner: country of origin, most-used words, year of filing, and applicant. As a result, we obtained data pointing to TRIZ as an important support methodology to the inventive process and identified the interactions of TRIZ with other support methodologies leading to creativity. Updates in TRIZ have been also found, regarding the use of basic patents, clustering inventive principles, and zero matrix solutions.