Keywords: TRIZ, innovation, QFD, clustering method.

In accordance with the changes in society, the scale of construction engineering larger and more complex. The impact of innovative technology and methods of construction result in the pressure of competition and updating technology. At this time in the development of the knowledge economy, the profit rate of a company focusing on manufacturing without innovating will fall. This shows that if a construction company wants to dominate the market, it should make resources and efforts in innovation to face the challenges of the market.

However, innovating itself is a complex process. If we want to submit an effective idea, we cannot depend on causal notion. We have to do it by systemic steps and scientific methods. Incorrect or time-wasting methods in innovation will cause serious damage to an organization.

Therefore, this paper discusses the application of the TRIZ (the theory of inventive problem solving) method to support a construction company to do innovative work. The paper also desribes how to improve the insufficiency of the use of TRIZ and demonstrates the innovation of pre-cast concrete members to illustrate the application.

TRIZ, developed by Genrich Altshuller and his colleagues in the former USSR starting in 1946, is now being developed and practiced throughout the world. TRIZ research began with the hypothesis that contains universal principles of invention that are the basis for creative innovations that advance technology. If these principles can be identified and codified, they could be taught to people to make the process of invention more predictable. The research has proceeded in several stages over the last 50 years - over 2 million patents have been examined, classified by level of inventiveness, and analyzed to look for principles of innovation [2].

According to TRIZ, the situation is called "contradiction" as we try to improve an engineering characteristic of a product or a process, which would lead to another engineering characteristic to worsen. Faced with the contradiction of this technique, the traditional method is to compromise. Yet, Altshuller thought that an innovative solution should eliminate the contradiction completely.

TRIZ holds that any invention of design could be achieved through resolving contradictions. As a consequence, the first step is to ask design engineers to search the contradictions between the design parameters, allocating them to the thirty-nine engineering parameters and finding the principle through referring to the contradiction matrix of TRIZ. Second, design engineers continue to look for their own solution to achieve the objects.

In other words, TRIZ can help design engineers to resolve the design problem by providing an explicit direction to achieve improvement. It can reduce the time for searching, avoid wasting resources and enhance the quality. The areas of application include management, business, software development, etc. [1,5].

Nevertheless, there are two problems in using TRIZ: how to determine the design parameters that will result in contradiction and how to make the contradicting design parameters correspond to any one of the thirty-nine engineering parameters objectively and separately. Due to these two problems, design engineers must determine design parameters that will result in contradiction subjectively. As a result, we will expect to develop an objective and regulative method to help in teh use of TRIZ [3,4].

This paper develops two models, including a contradiction design parameters extraction model. Finally, this paper takes pre-cast concrete members as an example to illustrate their application.

1

Darrell Mann, "Application of Triz Tools in a Non-Technical Problem Context", the TRIZ Journal. 2000.

2

Darrell Mann, Better technology forecasting using systematic innovation methods", Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 70, 779-795, 2003. doi:10.1016/S0040-1625(02)00357-8

3

Hipple. J, "The integration of TRIZ problem solving techniques with other problem solving and assessment tools", The TRIZ Journal. 2003.

4

R. Stratton, D. Mann, "Systematic innovation and the underlying principles behind TRIZ and TOC", Journal of Materials Processing Technology, 139, 120-126, 2003. doi:10.1016/S0924-0136(03)00192-4

5

Saliminamin. M.H., N. Nezafati, "A new method for creating non technological principles of TRIZ", The TRIZ Journal. 2003.

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