Exile of the Six-Winged Seraph

Abstract

Institutionalization of creative (innovative) system within any large company is hindered by… creative thinking. Only specific conditions and specific environment enables the creative thinking. Alas, these conditions are incompatible with company processes and policies.
How to resolve this contradiction? Exclude creative thinking from development of creative solutions to complex problems. Is it possible? If yes, under which conditions?
People usually mix these two concepts:

• Creative thinking: search for new solutions because none of the known solutions work, and
• Creative result: solution that is feasible and “unexpected” to the experts.

Due to this mix, people assume that development of creative solutions requires creative thinking. Let’s separate these issues, focus on the creative result.
The creative result is a system comprising modifications of resources involved in problem situation. Systemic Transition 1-c suggests: the system possesses the feature C, while its elements possess the opposite feature anti-C.
The key features of creative solution are:

1. It’s unexpected, unobvious, unfamiliar to the experts
2. It eliminates the problem completely

Then, the features of elements of creative solution are as follows:

1. They are expected, obvious, familiar to the experts
2. None of them can eliminate the problem completely

Client’s experts solving their own problem reveal modifications of resources, and then combine these modifications into the solutions. They extract the latent knowledge from their minds rather than generate “ideas.” This work does not require “creative” thinking.
Now, the task is reorganizing the TRIZ approach so that it could support such facilitation of cross-functional teams of clients’ experts.

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