TRIZ: Theory of Solving Inventive Problems to support engineering innovation in maritime industry

The key ingredient, which provides the strongest impact on success of an innovation process, is the stage of generating new inventive solution ideas, which requires creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. Until the beginning of the 2000th, and even still very much today, creative engineering has been random and chaotic as it was not supported by scientifically based methods. As a result, the process has low effectiveness of dealing with situations demanding new inventive solutions. Introduction of TRIZ (Theory of Solving Inventive Problems) has radically changed the situation in many industries. TRIZ provides a structured support to organize engineering creativity based on many years of studies of innovative development of diverse technical systems and technologies. These studies helped to extract and formulate generic patterns of inventive solutions, which can be reused to produce new ideas in a much shorter time period rather than using traditional methods to enhance creative thinking. Although TRIZ has been successfully used in a number of industries, its use in maritime industry has been rather limited, most likely due to the low awareness by maritime engineers. This paper discusses modern TRIZ and presents some of its techniques that can be utilized in maritime engineering.