Synopsis
Unified Structured Inventive How to Invent by E. N. Sickafus is a very complete textbook for the USIT method, derived from TRIZ. Ed Sickafus is an inventor and industrial scientist at Ford Motor Co., and a teacher and practitioner of the USIT method. The book’s introduction gives a short history of SIT and USIT, tracing it from the work of Genadi Filkovsky to the work of Roni Horowitz and Yacob Goldenberg at the Open University of Israel to the work of Sickafus, Craig Stephan, and their students and colleagues at Ford. The descriptions of the USIT methods are clear, and the examples are easy to understand. Many of the techniques are similar to those of TRIZ, such as formulation of a jargon-free description of the problem, and identification of the zones of conflict of the problem (called "Collection of Information" in USIT.) The "closed world diagram" in USIT corresponds to the functional analysis diagram or table, but also corresponds well with the problem formulator diagram. The USIT technique called the "qualitative change graph" is a very explicit way of formulating contradictions, if there are any in the problem. Although the USIT methodology uses the contradictions differently from the methods used in TRIZ to remove physical or technical contradictions, this is a method that TRIZ practioners could use to make it easier to understand contradictions in their problems.
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