Description:

This Master Prompt would focus on transforming an initially broad, ambiguous or poorly structured problem into a clearly formulated inventive problem suitable for TRIZ analysis. It would guide researchers in defining the system and supersystem, establishing system boundaries, identifying useful and harmful functions, analyzing components and interactions, determining performance deficiencies, tracing cause–effect relationships, recognizing available resources and identifying the core problem that should actually be solved.

A major emphasis would be placed on problem finding before solution generation. Researchers would avoid immediately selecting inventive principles before establishing what causes the undesirable effect and which system interactions produce the problem. Appropriate analytical tools could include situation analysis, functional analysis, Cause–Effect Chain Analysis, Substance–Field modeling, the Nine Windows/System Operator and related problem-framing techniques. The literature emphasizes that understanding the problem is a critical part of engineering problem solving and identifies several TRIZ tools—including Situation Analysis, Substance–Field Analysis, Ideal Result, ARIZ, OTSM and IDM-TRIZ—as useful for problem finding and problem formulation.