"TRIZ was perceived by Altshuller as a way to develop creativity in people."

In 1946, Genrich Altshuller, the founder of TRIZ, was a patent reviewer at the Russian naval patent office at the young age of 20. He perceived that there is a definite pattern in the way innovations take place in technical systems.

In his research Altshuller came upon the difficulty of obtaining objective information on the innovation process through psychological means, as the results were neither measurable nor reliable. In contrast, he reasoned, technical information is objective in nature. While there are no tools that allow us inside the human mind to study the process of innovation, the results of this process can be easily observed by studying the inventions themselves, or the patent literature associated with them.  Realizing that an innovation represents a fundamental change to a technological system -- and is therefore subject to analysis -- Altshuller turned his attention to the patent fund, screening over 200,000 patents from all over the world.  He identified 40,000 patents that constituted "inventive" achievements, and began a rigorous analysis of these. The results of his efforts formed the theoretical basis of TRIZ and laid the groundwork for the problem-solving tools that would later be developed. As the TRIZ methodology grew over the next four decades, the patent research continued; by the mid-1980s over 2 million patents had been investigated.

It was in the naval patent office that Altshuller first discovered the tenets that would lead him to TRIZ, discerning a common pattern of solutions to technical problems across a diversity of fields. The first thing he did with his theory, however, was find a new way to put his foot in his mouth. Concerned over the dismal state of the Soviet Union after World War II, Altshuller and an associate, Rafael Shapiro, wrote an earnest letter to Stalin.