History

Genrich Altshuller and the improbable journey of TRIZ — from a navy patent office and the Gulag to global engineering practice.

  1. 1926

    Birth in Tashkent

    Genrikh Saulovich Altshuller is born on 15 October 1926 in Tashkent, in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, and grows up mostly in Baku, Azerbaijan. He is the future creator of TRIZ, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving.

  2. 1943

    First author's certificate as a teenager

    While still a secondary-school student, at about age 17, Altshuller receives his first Soviet author's certificate (patent) for an underwater diving apparatus. His early inventing convinces him that creativity should be teachable rather than a matter of luck.

  3. 1946

    Working in a naval patent office

    Around age 20 Altshuller is assigned to the patent department of the Caspian Sea military flotilla, where inventors come to him for help. Unable to find a systematic method for inventing, he begins studying large numbers of patents to look for repeating patterns behind strong inventions.

  4. 1948

    Letter to Stalin

    In December 1948 Altshuller writes a letter addressed personally to Stalin, criticising the chaotic and unscientific way the USSR handled invention and arguing that a teachable theory of inventing could transform Soviet technology. The letter later becomes the pretext for his arrest.

  5. 1950

    Arrest and the Vorkuta Gulag

    In 1950 Altshuller and his colleague Rafael Shapiro are arrested and charged with "inventor's sabotage." He is sentenced to 25 years of hard labour and sent to the Vorkuta Gulag in the Arctic. Even in the camp he keeps interviewing fellow prisoners who are scientists and refining his ideas.

  6. 1954

    Release after Stalin's death

    Following Stalin's death in 1953, Altshuller is released in 1954 and returns to Baku. He resumes his research into the patterns of invention with renewed intensity, now convinced that the method can be turned into a formal theory.

  7. 1956

    First TRIZ paper published

    Altshuller and Shapiro publish "On the Psychology of Inventive Creativity" in the journal Voprosy Psikhologii (Issues of Psychology), No. 6, 1956. Challenging the belief that inventions come from random flashes of insight, it is regarded as the official birth of TRIZ.

  8. 1961

    First book: How to Learn to Invent

    Altshuller publishes his first book, How to Learn to Invent, popularising the idea that inventing follows learnable rules. It presents an early set of inventive principles distilled from his patent analysis.

  9. 1969

    The Innovation Algorithm and the 40 Principles

    By around 1969 Altshuller has analysed roughly 40,000 patent abstracts and publishes Algorithm of Invention. From this work come the core tools of classical TRIZ: the 40 Inventive Principles, the 39 engineering parameters, and the Contradiction Matrix.

  10. 1971

    First school for teaching TRIZ

    In 1971 Altshuller founds the Azerbaijan Public Institute for Inventive Creativity in Baku, the first institution dedicated to teaching TRIZ. A network of volunteer TRIZ schools spreads across the Soviet Union over the following decade.

  11. 1979–1984

    Major books mature the theory

    Altshuller publishes Creativity as an Exact Science (1979), which lays out TRIZ as a systematic discipline, and And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared (1984), which teaches the theory to schoolchildren through stories. Together they cement TRIZ as both a rigorous method and a teachable craft.

  12. 1989

    Russian TRIZ Association founded

    In 1989 the TRIZ community formalises itself as the Russian (later International) TRIZ Association, with Altshuller as its first president. The movement now has a formal organisation, conferences, and a growing body of practitioners.

  13. 1991

    TRIZ spreads to the West

    The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 lets many TRIZ experts emigrate, carrying the method to the United States, Europe, and East Asia. New organisations such as the Altshuller Institute for TRIZ Studies (Boston, 1995) and companies like Ideation International bring TRIZ to a global audience.

  14. 1998

    Death in Petrozavodsk

    Having moved to Petrozavodsk in northwestern Russia around 1990, Altshuller dies there on 24 September 1998 from complications of Parkinson's disease. He leaves behind a body of work that has reshaped how engineers think about problem solving.

  15. 2000s–present

    Corporate adoption and TRIZ meets AI

    From the late 1990s onward, corporations adopt TRIZ at scale: Samsung introduces it in 1997–1998 and by 2003 credits it with dozens of new patents. Today TRIZ is combined with software: patent-mining, machine learning over patent databases, and large language models are used to suggest inventive principles and automate contradiction analysis.

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