Overview

In 1946, a young patent examiner in the Soviet navy named Genrich Altshuller began asking a heretical question: is invention a matter of luck, or does it follow patterns? After screening hundreds of thousands of patents, he and his colleagues found that across every industry, inventors kept resolving contradictions with the same small set of moves — forty of them. He called the method TRIZ, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving.

This site collects all forty principles with hundreds of examples arranged along one axis: time. The same principle that shaped a 2,000-year-old plough shows up in jet engines, in microservices, and in this year's AI architectures. Browse the principles, wander the cases, then test yourself.