Advanced practice in TRIZ — gain fluency on real problems.

The most consequential step in TRIZ. We practice the full TOP-TRIZ approach to building an exhaustive list of problems worth solving from a single situation — including problems revealed by function analysis, by the history of the situation, by challenging the constraints, and by analysis of the supersystem and alternative systems.

How to formulate the Ideal Final Result for a given situation, and how to use it to direct the search for solutions. We practice the systematic generation of Ideal Ways and the use of available resources of the system, supersystem and environment to approximate them.

Building Sufficient Functions offers a step-by-step approach to introduce a new function or to find a better way to perform an existing one. The method is supported by a list of physical fields and effects that helps overcome background limitations — and we practice it on participants' real cases.

The Conflict Solving Algorithm guides you to achieve the desired improvement without any deterioration of the conflicting function. Even the most difficult problems with contradictions involved may be routinely solved without having to make trade-offs.

For example, a Boeing team had been struggling with a conflict between two features in the 767-TT design for three years. A trade-off was not applicable, making the problem seem unsolvable. Two solutions developed through a 4-hour TOP-TRIZ session were credited by the company for winning eight orders and saving millions of dollars.

TOP-TRIZ provides checklists for six Direct Ways to eliminate a harmful action, and four ways to turn a harmful action into a benefit. We work through each, then apply them to the unwanted functions in participants' own systems.

A new solution rarely deserves a single application. We practice systematic techniques for extending a solution — finding new uses, related products, related processes and patentable variations — so the engineering effort behind one breakthrough yields multiple returns.

Real problems rarely fit one tool cleanly. The Advanced course practices the disciplined combination of function analysis, Ideal Ways, Conflict Solving Algorithm, Build Sufficient Functions and Harmful Action Elimination — following the TOP-TRIZ flowchart end-to-end on increasingly difficult cases.

Conventional road-mapping is usually based on past trends of development of the same product, and is very often incorrect for the long term. TOP-TRIZ Technological Forecast is based on a set of trends drawn from the evolution of hundreds of products. There is a very high probability that your product will follow the same evolutionary steps — and we practice using those trends to invent its future.

The center of gravity of the Advanced course. Participants bring problems from their own engineering practice — product development, manufacturing, RCCA, cost reduction, patent circumvention — and the cohort works through them together using TOP-TRIZ, with Z. Royzen guiding each formulation and solution path.

Every solved problem is an opportunity to internalize a TRIZ pattern. We practice the discipline of debriefing each application — identifying which step in the algorithm produced the breakthrough, which heuristic surfaced the contradiction, which resource resolved it — so that the lesson generalizes to the next problem you face on the job.

The TOP-TRIZ Problem Formulator and Solver software is built on the same algorithm taught in the course. In the Advanced class we use it as the working surface for facilitating teams, capturing the formulation of contradictions, and generating solutions. A one-year free license is included with this course (a $2,000 value).