Either at a startup or a large organization, we often face problems and challenges related to
different business and management issues that cannot be easily solved. Sometimes we might know a solution but limitations and constraints do not allow us to use it. Or we do not see a proper problem solving strategy. In most cases it happens due to a conflict of demands which we also know as a contradiction: we want to change something or achieve a certain goal but something else prevents us from obtaining the result desired.
Usually contradictions are very difficult to solve without creating compromises which can be costly or which still do not bring the expected result in full. In such situations we try to apply creative thinking to “get out of the box” to resolve the conflict in the best possible way. In the recent past, our ability to quickly develop new effective and efficient innovative ideas of solutions as a response to difficult problems was considered as a gift, and a process of problem solving was chaotic and non-manageable.
These days the situation is different. A major impact on understanding innovative problem solving has been produced by the TRIZ studies which resulted in a number of practical and systematic methods and techniques supporting creativity and innovation.
A key advantage of our approach to creative problem solving is that instead of trying to randomly jump to a solution we use techniques which provide a guided search among patterns of the best innovative ideas. These patterns were collected during many years of studies. The use of these patterns provides much higher success of quickly finding a needed solution than classical methods based on trials and errors. These techniques quickly gained reputation as the best practice of innovation at such companies as General Electric, Intel, Procter & Gamble, Samsung.
Although mostly known for their use in technology and engineering, during last dozen of years the TRIZ techniques have been extended to business and management areas. The techniques can be used to define and solve problems to innovatively: