TRIZ in the knowledge era: achieving profitable e-commerce

TRIZ is the data-based creativity method based on the work of G. Altshuller and his colleagues in the former USSR. It is becoming known in the West as a method for systematic innovation that creates useful, innovative concepts fast. Because the TRIZ research was originally based on the world patent database of the 1940s-1980s, there has been some doubt that TRIZ applies to the problems of the 21/sup st/ century. Applications to e-business situations will demonstrate that TRIZ is a powerful tool for problem solving, technology forecasting, and business development for the emerging knowledge era. Current e-business paradigms include inherent contradictions. The strength of TRIZ as a method for developing creative solutions to problems is the removal of contradictions, rather than the conventional approach of accepting compromises or making tradeoffs. Examples and case studies from e-business illustrate strategies emerging from the TRIZ methods of ideality, the use of resources, trends of evolution and TRIZ-derived inventive principles which may offer means of breaking out of the current loss-making paradigms.