TRIZ: 40 principles and their ranking by contradiction matrix

TRIZ (Teoriya Resheniya Izobreatatelskikh Zadatch in Russian or Theory of Inventive Problem Solving in English) is a set of tools developed by G. Altshuller in early USSR during 1940 to 1985 in order to solve inventive problems. Though originally TRIZ was developed to solve technical problems, at present time some of the tools of TRIZ are also used to solve managerial and business problems. 40 Principles and Contradiction matrix is one of the tools to solve inventive problems in TRIZ. In this paper, which principles out of 40 principles are more important and significant is tried to find out with the help of their appearance (frequency) in contradiction matrix. All the 40 principles are ranked according to the frequency of use in contradiction matrix. It is found in the study that only 20 principles are capable to address more than 75% of the contradiction.