TRIZ industrial case studies: a critical survey

TRIZ is one of the most powerful and accepted methods to make systematic innovation. Despite TRIZ official development ended in 1985, researchers have continued its development by proposing new approaches (e.g. OTSM, TRIZ+, SPARK) or by extending existing ones. After all these efforts, the spread of TRIZ has never reached the level of capillarity expected. For this reason, in the last years, TRIZ community has interrogated more than once about the motivations for this slow growth. In order to accelerate the spread of TRIZ, many attempts were made to simplify the method, sometimes by integrating it with other methods (such as FMEA, QFD, Lean) that were already present in production plants and increasing TRIZ notoriety by publishing successful case studies. This work is an updated picture of the current situation of TRIZ case studies publications. More than 200 case studies from TRIZ journal and ETRIA TRIZ Future Conference have been collected, analysed and processed to understand Why companies needs TRIZ, which tools are the most used, how TRIZ has been integrated with other methods, and how industries and academies communicate their success. Differently to other surveys, this study also focuses on the ways in which solutions are presented, so as to identify best practices or new ideas and trends from a communication perspective. This paper contains the results of this analysis and the related comments. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.