# Adapted Use of the TRIZ System Operator
## 1 Introduction  
TRIZ is nowadays one of the most acknowledged bases of knowledge for problem solving, mentioned in several literature contributions. The acronym TRIZ stands for Teoriya Resheniya Izobretatelskikh Zadach', often translated in English as the 'theory of the resolution of inventive problems'. TRIZ offers a set of tools to be conveniently selected according to specific needs [1]. It was formerly developed by [PERSON] [2], whose first publication (_On the Psychology of Inventive Creativity_[3]) dates back to 1956 and argues about how to solve thousands of different technical contradictions by means of a limited number of 'inventriciples'. It is also worth noticing that several classical TRIZ developments and/or alternatives arose during the years (e.g., SIT [4], USIT [5], CROST [6], etc.). Providing descriptions of these contributions falls out of the scope of this paper. However, the main observations originally made by [PERSON] can be summarised in the following three points [1, 7]:  
* Technical systems evolve according to objective laws, towards an increasing degree of ideality (i.e., the ratio between benefits and the sum of costs, intended as resource consumption, and harmful effects). * Any specific technical problem can be converted into a more general one through an abstraction process. Thanks to the abstraction, [PERSON] observed that similar problems arise in very different fields, allowing the related solving processes to be grouped in a finite number of'solving principles'. Given a finite number of standardised problems and solving principles, solutions based on similar concepts can be used for solving apparently different technical problems. The diffusion of TRIZ actually started after the fall of the Soviet regime. Indeed, many collaborators of [PERSON] started to work in North America, Europe, and East Asia. Consequently, TRIZ is now taught in universities and adopted by well-known companies across 35 countries [8]. In particular, some big industry corporations immediately acknowledged its benefits [9]. Among them, Samsung represents one of the best experiences of TRIZ adoption in the industry [10,11]. The potentialities of TRIZ have been also scientifically observed by performing evaluations and tests through academic students (e.g., [PERSON] et al. [12], [PERSON] et al. [13]). Moreover, scholars have performed investigations on the actual use of TRIZ tools within the industry ([PERSON] [14], [PERSON] et al. [8]), substantially observing that only a limited and not univocally defined set of TRIZ tools are usually considered by practitioners, among those available. Furthermore, several studies propose to exploit TRIZ, and/or some of its fundamentals for different design-related purposes (e.g., [15; 16; 17; 18]). These lines of evidence show that, despite the potentialities, the actual use of TRIZ tools is far from standardisation. Additionally, although some structured procedures can be used to select the most suited tool, it is worth noticing that the selection of the tools strongly depends on the skills of the user, who should be well trained for ensuring a correct application (e.g., [19]). For this work, the authors considered the tool named 'System Operator' (hereinafter called SO). The SO is a 3 \(\times\) 3 (or even larger) matrix which allows the translation of the problem formulated in the central box into eight different forms. It is also known as 'Nine Boxes', 'Nine Windows', or simply 'Multiscreen' operator, and is one of the most acknowledged TRIZ tools [8]. According to Figure 1, the rows allow focusing the attention on different resources potentially available outside the system, in the system itself, and in the subparts of the system. More specifically, the central row of SO represents the system, the bottom row represents the parts constituting the system (i.e., subsystems), while the upper row represents the elements of the environment to which the system belongs or all other systems with which the system can interact (i.e., supersystem).