Invention Was Never Supposed to Be a Brainstorm
dttriz is live — a Guide that docks Design Thinking with TRIZ, the two innovation frameworks from opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, into one mechanism. The Soyuz-Apollo of Innovation, operationalized.
“Think outside the box” is an instruction without a mechanism — like telling someone who can’t swim to just not drown. I’ve written before about the two tools that actually supply the mechanism, invented on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain and never meant to sit in the same room.
One is TRIZ — Soviet, empirical, slightly terrifying in its rigor. Genrikh Altshuller read several thousand patents in a naval office in 1946, noticed that good inventions resolve a contradiction and that those resolutions repeat across fields, decided the country needed a science of invention, and got twenty-five years in the Gulag for suggesting so. He built it anyway. The other is Design Thinking — Californian, human-centered, occasionally accused of being a glorified brainstorm with nicer Post-its. Empathy, diverge and converge, and above all: don’t jump to the solution.
Separately, each is useful and each is incomplete. Design Thinking finds the right problem and never tells you how to crack it. TRIZ cracks it and doesn’t much care whether it was worth solving. Dock them together and you get something else — the closest thing we have to a reliable machine for problems that shouldn’t have solutions. I called that the Soyuz-Apollo of Innovation. dttriz is that thesis, operationalized. The name is not subtle: dt + triz.
What it does
You describe your actual problem, in plain language, the way you’d describe it to a colleague who won’t let you get away with hand-waving. A Guide walks you through the whole arc, one phase at a time — Empathize & Define the real problem before you fall in love with a solution, isolate the contradiction hiding inside it, envision the ideal result, run inventive ideation against the principles that have historically resolved that contradiction in other domains, then prototype and validate. Design Thinking on the outside, TRIZ in the engine room. At the end it hands you an artifact you can drop straight into a coding agent, because it’s 2026 and the next thing that happens to a good idea is that someone asks Claude to build it.
The part I refused to compromise on: the TRIZ half is grounded in the real matrix, the real principles, the real standard solutions. The Guide isn’t inventing engineering theory on the spot to please you — TRIZ is the opposite of an agreeable chatbot. It tells you your problem is a contradiction and then makes you sit with it. I didn’t want to bolt a yes-man onto a serious method. The whole point is friction in the right places.
Pick your Guide, name it, set its tone. It speaks English, Russian, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese, which covers most of the rooms I’ve worked in.
It’s live at dttriz.siberiasoft.com. Access is invite-only for now.
Altshuller got twenty-five years for suggesting the country needed this. You just need a login.