TRIZ Inventive Principles
9 through 16

There are 40 TRIZ Inventive Principles. Here we cover 9-16 of the principles.

Click here to read 1 - 8 of the Triz Principles

9. Preliminary Anti-action

Preliminary anti-action is a risk avoidance tool that seeks to eliminate or diminish any possibility of risk by using preliminary anti-actions.

Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is a systematic method for process evaluation to identify where and how it might fail and to assess the possibility of implementing preventive actions.

SWOT, another tool, helps you determine strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of a given situation, process, improvement, and current state issues. Conducting the SWOT study is a Preliminary Anti-action

If it is necessary to perform an action with both harmful and useful effects, this action should be replaced with anti-actions to control the harmful effects.

10. Preliminary Action

The inventive principle ‘Preliminary Action’ means performing preparatory activities to speed up the execution of planned tasks.

Examples:

• Prepare a maintenance program before starting to sell products.
• Prepare a RISK analysis; identify and perform necessary preventive actions to reduce risks before starting new processes.
• Preventive action from a corrective action

11. Beforehand Cushioning

The inventive principle ‘Beforehand Cushioning’ is used to prepare things ahead of an event in order to increase reliability.

To increase the reliability of systems use a redundancy of system elements

Examples

• backup power supply units
• backup disc units
• Error Detection and Correction systems for memory protection
• in production processes use Poka-Yoke..

12. Equipotentiality

The inventive principle ‘Equipotentiality’ in quality management means equal treatment of all customers. It also means forming communication channels at all management levels including internally, and between the customer and the supplier.

In a company, the organization takes care to eliminate the need to transfer operations from one management level to another.

13. The Other Way Round

The inventive principle ‘The Other Way Round’ means doing things in the opposite way of normal.

Examples of inverted actions:

• Use the KANBAN system. Instead of pushing a product to the market, let the market pull the product from your company.
• Make design engineers be temporary members of a field sales force.
• Design, produce and sell products as a kit and have customers assemble the products themselves.

14. Spheroidality - Curvature

The inventive principle ‘Spheroidality – Curvature’ in quality management means performing activities so as to enable smooth operations requiring less time and effort with lower costs.

Example:

• Ergonomic desk/work-station design.
• Quality Circles
• Circular work cells

15. Dynamics

The inventive principle ‘Dynamics’ means creating systems that are able to adapt to external and internal changes. In quality management this principle can be used to create a system of interconnected processes capable of quickly responding to all requirements.

For example

• the ability to create, on the fly, custom customer shipping labels.
• Having an in house design process that can accommodate any customer requirement.
• Using Cad for design.
• Sampling based on lot size and changing inspection parameters
  

16. Partial or Excessive Actions

When it is not possible to achieve perfection, we can consider doing things at less than or even more than 100%. Using Pareto analysis we can prioritize issues and decide to solve the vital few options while ignoring the trivial many.

Example:

• Procedure for corrective actions according to ISO 9001 requirements.
• Sampling
• Auditing
• Management Review
  

References

Gennady Retseptor, 40 Inventive Principles in Quality Management, http://www.realinnovation.com/archives/2003/03/a/01.pdf

Darrell Mann, Hands –On Systematic Innovation for Business and Management, IFR Press 2009, ISBN1-898546-73-8