Cause-and-effect function analysis

TRIZ has been getting spotlight in technology innovation due to a set of excellent practical tools for problem solving. And especially the 40 inventive principles are the representative and basic tool of TRIZ. However some criticize these principles as they are not so easy for ordinary users to utilize. Firstly, it is very difficult to select the most appropriate principle among the 40 principles including 39 irrelevant ones. Secondly, it is still difficult to apply selected principle to problems. Therefore, this paper suggests the cause-and-effect function analysis to overcome this problem. With this methodology, we can build function network which has two main contributions, finding inventive principles and discovering new functions. As a result, the cause-and-effect function analysis and function network can make a system which leads technology innovations.