Earticle

A creative innovation and an innovative problem-solving of industrial companies can be achieved by overcoming the challenges of technical and physical contradictions. The approaches to address conflicting and paradoxical problems, such as technical and physical contradictions have a crucial role in advancing the quality assessment for manufacturer and service provider. The term, technical contradiction, depicts the state that improvement of one ends of IFR (Ideal Final Result) leads to unfavorable condition of the other ends, and results in conflicting problem. Another type of contradictions that’s discussed in this study is a physical contradiction which is due to two mutually opposing states of the means of ends, and gives paradoxical situation. By integrating the means-ends chain perspectives, the physical contradiction that is a specifically root-causes, “means”, can be initially addressed to resolve the downstream problem of technical contradiction which represents a general and abstract goals, “ends”. This research suggests IFR resolution processes to handle both physical contradiction of means and technical contradiction of ends by employing causal relationship with IFR, effects and causes. In summary, the study represents three major processes that resolve such contradictions are demonstrated as follows: 1) Derivation of causal and hierarchical relationship among IFR, ends and means by considering CAED (Cause-And-Effect Diagram) and LT (Logic Tree). 2) Identification of causal relationship between physical contradiction and technical contradiction by using TPCT (TRIZ Physical Contradiction Tree) and TCD (Technical Contradiction Diagram). 3) Application of integrated TRIZ principles by classifying 40 inventive principles into 4 general conditions of the separation principle of mutually opposite states in space, in time, based on conditions, and between the parts and the whole. In order to validate the proof of proposed IFR resolution processes, the analysis of the TRIZ case studies from National Quality Circle Contest in the years, 2011 to 2014 have been proposed. The suggested guidelines that are built based on TRIZ principles can uniquely enhance the process of quality innovation and assessment for quality practitioners.

Creative problem solving has become an important issue in many fields. Among problems, dilemma need creative solutions. New creative and innovative problem solving strategies are required to handle the contradiction relations of the dilemma problems because most creative and innovative cases solved contradictions inherent in the dilemmas. Among various kinds of problem solving theories, TRIZ provides the concept of physical contradiction as a common problem solving principle in inventions and patents. In TRIZ, 4 separation principles solve the physical contradictions of given problems. The 4 separation principles are separation in time, separation in space, separation within a whole and its parts, and separation upon conditions. Despite this attention, an accurate definitions of the separation principles of TRIZ is missing from the literature. Thus, there have been several different interpretations about the separation principles of TRIZ. The different interpretations make problems more ambiguous to solve when the problem solvers apply the 4 separation principles. This research aims to fill the gap in several ways. First, this paper classify the types of contradiction relations and the contradiction solving dimensions based on the Butterfly model for contradiction solving. Second, this paper compares and analyzes each contradiction relation type with the Butterfly diagram. The contributions of this paper lies in reducing the problem space by recognizing the structures and the types of contradiction problems exactly.