Coaching practices for Altshuller Inventive Principles
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Altshuller Inventive Principles, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I’ve been treating this like a problem nobody’s ever solved, pouring original effort into it
- I’ve been brainstorming this for hours and every idea is a slight variation on the same one
- I’ve got this fresh idea I’m genuinely excited about, and that excitement is making me go easy on it
- Every idea I come up with is basically a tweak on what someone’s already done
- I have a cross-pollinated idea that might be brilliant or might be nonsense
Practices that may help
- Calibrate whether the problem requires invention or just search
Determine whether your problem is already solved elsewhere before investing in original invention.
TRIZ: Systematic Invention and the Logic of Contradictions - Sample inventive principles to generate solution directions
Apply one or more of TRIZ’s 40 inventive principles as generative lenses, even without the full contradiction matrix.
TRIZ: Systematic Invention and the Logic of Contradictions - TRIZ: Systematic Invention and the Logic of Contradictions
TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) is a systematic innovation method developed by Genrich Altshuller after analyzing hundreds of thousands of patents. Its core insight is that most breakthrough problems contain a "technical or physical contradiction" — a situation where improving one parameter worsens another — and that inventors across fields resolve these contradictions using a surprisingly small set of recurring strategies. - Rebuild from fundamentals and stress-test it
Reassemble a solution from verified parts, then attack it to find where it breaks.
First-Principles Thinking, Made Usable - Reason up from the parts, not by analogy
Build the solution from the fundamentals you kept, rather than copying an existing template.
First-Principles Thinking, Made Usable - Run low-cost experiments on intersectional ideas
Test cross-domain ideas quickly and cheaply before investing in them fully.
The Medici Effect: Innovation at the Intersection - Repeat, loop, or return to an old idea deliberately
"Use an old idea" — something already in your history may work now that it could not before.
Oblique Strategies, Made Practical - First-Principles Thinking, Made Usable
First-principles thinking means breaking a problem down to the fundamental truths you are sure of, then reasoning back up from those — instead of reasoning by analogy to “how it’s usually done.” Traceable to Aristotle and popularized in modern form by figures like Elon Musk, it is a reasoning discipline, not a tested intervention; its value is mechanistic — it strips out inherited assumptions. - Combine and build on others’ ideas
Treat every idea as a building block — the best ideas in a session are usually hybrids.
Osborn’s Brainstorming Rules, Made Practical - Change exactly one element and observe what shifts
Alter a single variable at a time to see how the rest of the system responds.
Oblique Strategies, Made Practical
Related concerns
- Inventive Principles Examples
Apply one or more of TRIZ’s 40 inventive principles as generative lenses, even without the full contradiction matrix.
Sample inventive principles to generate solution directions
- Is It Appropriate That My Boss Patented My Idea
Determine whether your problem is already solved elsewhere before investing in original invention.
Calibrate whether the problem requires invention or just search
- Elon Musk First Principles
First-principles thinking means breaking a problem down to the fundamental truths you are sure of, then reasoning back up from those — instead of reasoning by analogy to “how it’s usually done.” Traceable to Aristotle and popularized in modern form by figures like Elon Musk, it is a reasoning discipline, not a tested intervention; its value is mechanistic — it strips out inherited assumptions.
- First Principles Thinking
First-principles thinking means breaking a problem down to the fundamental truths you are sure of, then reasoning back up from those — instead of reasoning by analogy to “how it’s usually done.” Traceable to Aristotle and popularized in modern form by figures like Elon Musk, it is a reasoning discipline, not a tested intervention; its value is mechanistic — it strips out inherited assumptions.
- First Principles Thinking Made Usable As A Parent
First-principles thinking means breaking a problem down to the fundamental truths you are sure of, then reasoning back up from those — instead of reasoning by analogy to “how it’s usually done.” Traceable to Aristotle and popularized in modern form by figures like Elon Musk, it is a reasoning discipline, not a tested intervention; its value is mechanistic — it strips out inherited assumptions.
- First Principles Thinking Made Usable At Work
First-principles thinking means breaking a problem down to the fundamental truths you are sure of, then reasoning back up from those — instead of reasoning by analogy to “how it’s usually done.” Traceable to Aristotle and popularized in modern form by figures like Elon Musk, it is a reasoning discipline, not a tested intervention; its value is mechanistic — it strips out inherited assumptions.
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