TRIZ For Dummies

Chapter 5

Improving Ideality by Using Resources

In This Chapter

Understanding Ideality

Finding and using resources to create elegant solutions

Getting the best results from the resources you have to hand

The main purpose of TRIZ is to increase Ideality. And this chapter is a great place to start thinking about how to do so.

Ideality is how you assess how good something is: you consider the proportion of benefits (all the things you want) over its costs (all inputs) and harms (all outputs you don’t want). Measuring Ideality is a quick and simple way to understand the pros and cons of your systems and processes: you can start by checking you have all the benefits you want and also identify any problems and see how to solve them.

Your inputs (costs) result in functions, which give you two kinds of outputs: outputs you want (benefits) and outputs you don’t want (harms). When you problem solve, you improve Ideality by improving your functions; that is, reducing harmful functions, improving insufficiently useful functions and reducing input functions.

By far the most elegant way of improving systems is with the wise and clever use of all your available resources, as explained in the ...