TRIZ or How to Mass-Produce Genius

In the modern West, when a company wants to innovate, it summons a workshop. Sticky notes appear. Someone draws a Venn diagram. A facilitator, paid handsomely, asks everyone how they might "ideate" if they were a child, or a dolphin, or possibly a child dolphin. By the end of the day, the wall is colorful, the catering is gone, and nothing has been invented. Meanwhile, in the more disreputable corners of Korean electronics conglomerates and before that German engineering firms, people are quietly using a system designed by a Soviet naval officer in the 1940s, and producing actual patents at a rate that should embarrass everyone else. The system is called TRIZ (from Russian - ТРИЗ - теория решения изобретательских задач - teoriya resheniya izobretatelskikh zadach, lit. 'theory of inventive problem solving') and it is one of the strangest and most useful intellectual exports of the USSR, somewhere between vodka, chess grandmasters, and the Kalashnikov on the list of Russian things that…