Why this site exists
At the SV–Asia Youth Innovation Leaders Summit (July 19, 2026, National Taiwan University), Chih-Yao Wu — executive director of the Chinese Innovation and Invention Society and a long-time promoter of invention education in Taiwan — gave a talk that mentioned TRIZ and its forty inventive principles. That one mention turned into this rabbit hole: a full bilingual field guide to all forty principles, with cases stretching from ancient crafts to modern AI systems.
TRIZ deserves the treatment. Most creativity advice tells you to think outside the box; TRIZ hands you a map of the box, drawn from the patterns of several hundred thousand actual inventions.
What is TRIZ?
TRIZ (Russian: Теория решения изобретательских задач, "Theory of Inventive Problem Solving") was developed from 1946 onwards by Genrich Altshuller and his colleagues in the Soviet Union. Its core observations: inventive problems contain contradictions (improving one parameter worsens another); the same contradictions recur across industries; and the inventive moves that resolve them recur too. Altshuller distilled forty such moves — the 40 Inventive Principles — and mapped them against 39 engineering parameters in his famous contradiction matrix.
You can wait a hundred years for enlightenment, or you can solve the problem in 15 minutes with these principles. — attributed to Genrich Altshuller
The principles were formulated for mechanical engineering, but they describe something more general: the finite geometry of good solutions. That is why this site deliberately pairs each principle with software, business and AI cases — the domains changed, the moves did not.
How this was compiled
Definitions and sub-principles follow the standard TRIZ literature. Examples come in two kinds: classic textbook cases from the TRIZ tradition, and modern cases (especially software and AI) researched and verified against public sources for this site. Every principle's detail view lists its sources; the raw research notes live in the repository's /research folder.
- Principle names follow common English usage; Chinese names follow translations common in Taiwan's TRIZ community, with alternates listed as aliases.
- The four thematic groups (Structure, Process, Matter, System) are this site's own editorial grouping — not an official TRIZ taxonomy.
- Software and AI cases marked as structural analogies are interpretations, not claims that the inventors consciously applied TRIZ.
Disclaimer
This is an independent educational project. It is not affiliated with any TRIZ association, the summit, or any speaker mentioned. Corrections and better examples are welcome — open an issue on GitHub.