Resources in TRIZ

Overview

The concept of resources in TRIZ goes beyond the conventional understanding of natural, financial, or human resources. Here, they are expanded into inventive and evolutionary resources that can be harnessed to enhance the engineering system performance and achieve its ideality by providing additional useful features, as well as reducing cost-related factors.

Importance of resources in TRIZ

The concept of resources is closely tied to the concept of system ideality, which indicates the direction to follow when developing a system.

Ideality is defined as the ratio of the total benefits provided by a system to the sum of all associated cost-related factors. These factors include not only direct costs, but also required space, environmental harm, maintenance, and so on. To move in the direction of ideality, one must simultaneously increase the system’s functionality and reduce its costs.

Using resources that already exist within the technical system eliminates the need to acquire new ones – which means lower costs and often lower system complexity. On the other hand, such resources may also provide additional useful functions.

Types of resources in TRIZ

At a general level, TRIZ distinguishes between inventive resources and evolutionary resources.

Inventive resources

An inventive resource in TRIZ can be the following:

any substance or anything made of a substance (including waste) that is available in the system or its supersystem,
an energy reserve, free time, unoccupied space, information, etc., and
the functional and technological ability to perform additional functions, including properties of substances as well as physical, chemical, geometric, and other effects.

First attempts to formalize the process of identifying resources were proposed by Altshuller back in the 1980s. He introduced a well-developed concept of resource utilization within ARIZ.

According to it, resources can be grouped in the following categories:

A. Based on accessibility:

internal (limited to the main elements of the system),
external, including resources from the general environment and those which are specific for the given system, and
resources from the super-system or other accessible, inexpensive resources (including waste).

B. Based on readiness for utilization:

readily-available resources, and
derived (modified readily-available resources).

Resources can exist in different:

quantities – they can be insufficient, sufficient, or unlimited,
quality – they can be useful, neutral, or harmful, and
value – they can be expensive, cheap, or free.

Evolutionary resource

Evolutionary resources are those that result from the system’s prior development and can enable its next evolutionary leap.

This includes the entire body of knowledge, ideas, concepts, patents, solutions from other fields, previously rejected ideas (e.g., too advanced at the time), opportunities for technology transfer and adaptation, as well as potential for system integration and hybridization.

Algorithm of identifying resources

To identify resources the following algorithm should be used: