Abstract:

“TRIZ and Axiomatic Design: The Innovation of Eliminating Tradeoffs”

You’ve done your laundry list of requirements. Perhaps you’ve even hierarchically decomposed it! And after much time and money, you have several concepts to evaluate. Doing traditional trades analysis, you’ve found some concepts are terrible, some are fair, and one might be interesting. None are really innovative and all have warts and flaws that can’t be resolved. How did you ever get to this position with not much to show for it?

TRIZ and Axiomatic Design are two innovation methodologies that share principles and axioms for invention and optimum or “ideal” designs. Both eliminate the need for “trade-offs” early in development.

TRIZ states that technical systems evolve towards an increasing “ideality” by overcoming engineering conflicts of functions without trade-offs with minimal addition of resources. TRIZ resulted after the examination of over 2 million patents for patterns of innovation. The findings showed that Inventing can be taught because:

• Problems and Solutions repeated across industries
• Technology evolved in repeatable patterns across industries
• The best innovations happened when scientific effects were applied to problems that were OUTSIDE the field where the problem originated

Companies such as Procter & Gamble, Motorola, Ford, Phillips, and Siemens have used TRIZ with great success.

Axiomatic Design, developed by Dr. Nam Suh from MIT is based on two major design axioms.

• Axiom 1 The Independence Axiom: An optimal design always maintains the independence of Functional Requirements.
• Axiom 2 The Information Axiom: The best design is a functionally uncoupled design that has the minimum information content.

Axiomatic Design states that designs where functional requirements are coupled and not independent can never be optimized! And most designs are coupled with no visibility of where it’s happening. So much for trades analysis! But there is hope, Axiomatic Design helps overcome engineering conflicts for an ideal design by eliminating this coupling.

Learn how both Axiomatic Design and TRIZ used together guarantee success and great design without trade-offs. And when someone asks you to “think outside the box”, you’ll say “What box?”

Contact Information:

Ms. Janice M. Marconi

President, Marconi Works, International

5 Lambert's Lane

Stonington, CT 06378

1-860-535-1331 (voice)

1-860-535-8448 (fax)

marconi@marconiworks.com