TRIZ for Engineers: Enabling Inventive Problem Solving

TRIZ is a brilliant toolkit for nurturing engineering creativity and innovation. This accessible, colourful and practical guide has been developed from problem-solving workshops run by Oxford Creativity, one of the world's top TRIZ training organizations started by Gadd in 1998. Gadd has successfully introduced TRIZ to many major organisations such as Airbus, Sellafield Sites, Saint-Gobain, DCA, Doosan Babcock, Kraft, Qinetiq, Trelleborg, Rolls Royce and BAE Systems, working on diverse major projects including next generation submarines, chocolate packaging, nuclear clean-up, sustainability and cost reduction.

Engineering companies are increasingly recognising and acting upon the need to encourage successful, practical and systematic innovation at every stage of the engineering process including product development and design. TRIZ enables greater clarity of thought and taps into the creativity innate in all of us, transforming random, ineffective brainstorming into targeted, audited, creative sessions focussed on the problem at hand and unlocking the engineers' knowledge and genius to identify all the relevant solutions.

For good design engineers and technical directors across all industries, as well as students of engineering, entrepreneurship and innovation, TRIZ for Engineers will help unlock and realise the potential of TRIZ. The individual tools are straightforward, the problem-solving process is systematic and repeatable, and the results will speak for themselves.

This highly innovative book:

• Satisfies the need for concise, clearly presented information together with practical advice on TRIZ and problem solving algorithms
• Employs explanatory techniques, processes and examples that have been used to train thousands of engineers to use TRIZ successfully
• Contains real, relevant and recent case studies from major blue chip companies
• Is illustrated throughout with specially commissioned full-colour cartoons that illustrate the various concepts and techniques and bring the theory to life
• Turns good engineers into great engineers.

About the Author

Karen Gadd has been teaching TRIZ and problem solving with engineering teams from major companies for over 13 years. Her mission is to make TRIZ learning straightforward and the TRIZ Tools easy to use. She has worked on nothing but TRIZ since discovering and learning its power to give us all the routes, to all the solutions, to all engineering problems.

In 1998 Karen started Oxford Creativity to concentrate on developing simple and practical TRIZ problem solving for the European market. Karen has taken TRIZ to major companies including Rolls-Royce, British Nuclear Group, Bentley Motors, BAE Systems, Nissan, Pilkington, Borealis and Sanofi Aventis. Oxford Creativity is now well established as one of the world's top TRIZ companies and has helped to make TRIZ well known and widely used throughout Europe and encouraged top companies to create expert TRIZ teams for innovative problem solving.

Karen studied Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College, and has an MBA from London Business School. After working in strategy and corporate planning in the City of London she returned to live in Oxford and was a tutor at Oxford's Business School the European School of Management ESCP-EAP (based in Paris, Oxford, Madrid and Berlin). From 1995-2002 she was a Governor of Coventry University. Karen's career has been dedicated to creating new enterprises which make a difference - she founded both MUSIC at OXFORD and the European Union Baroque Orchestra and ran both for over ten years and raised millions in corporate sponsorship to make their activities possible. These successful music organisations still flourish. MUSIC at OXFORD transformed Oxford's music scene and is now approaching its 30th season of top professional classical concerts. EUBO has celebrated 25 years of launching the careers of talented young musicians and has been so successful in its mission, that there are now former EUBO students in every major professional baroque ensemble in the world. Karen launched Oxford Creativity to make TRIZ accessible to everyone and transform and launch careers of TRIZ enthusiasts and champions. There are now thousands of engineers who have learned TRIZ from Karen and who intelligently daily apply TRIZ to solve difficult technical and scientific problems.

Karen is long married, has four children and three grandchildren lives happily in Oxford and the Lake District. Karen has recently become a director of the Orchestra of St.John's and concerts and singing are still part of her interests and activities.