TRIZ 40の発明原理と矛盾マトリックス

The 40 Inventive Principles and the Contradiction Matrix are foundational elements of classical トリズ, developed by Genrich Altshuller and his colleagues after analyzing over 40,000 patents. They observed that the same fundamental problems and solutions appeared across different fields of technology. The core idea is to systematically overcome ‘technical contradictions’. A technical contradiction occurs when an attempt to improve one characteristic of a system (e.g., speed) leads to the degradation of another (e.g., reliability).

Altshuller identified 39 standard system parameters, such as ‘Weight of moving object’, ‘Strength’, ‘Temperature’, and ‘Productivity’. The Contradiction Matrix is a 39×39 grid where the rows represent the parameter to be improved and the columns represent the worsening parameter. At the intersection of a specific row and column, the matrix provides numbers corresponding to the most frequently used Inventive Principles for that type of contradiction in the patent database. For example, to solve a contradiction between ‘Strength’ (improving) and ‘Weight of stationary object’ (worsening), the matrix might suggest principles like #1 (Segmentation), #10 (Preliminary Action), or #40 (Composite Materials). The principles themselves are abstract heuristics, such as ‘Segmentation’ (divide an object into independent parts), ‘Asymmetry’ (make an object asymmetrical), or ‘Universality’ (make a part perform multiple functions). This structured approach transforms a specific, difficult problem into a general problem, finds a general solution using the principles, and then adapts that general solution back to the specific context, bypassing 心理的 inertia and trial-and-error.