Question ledger — Structured innovation methods (SIT, TRIZ, SCAMPER)

Observed date: 2026-07-29
Status: stabilized after primary web + X research rounds; KG had zero prior coverage.

Primary questions

P1. What are TRIZ, SIT, and SCAMPER, and how are they related?

• S1. What does each acronym expand to, and when was each created?
• S2. Who are the founding people and institutional homes?
• S3. Is SIT a subset, simplification, or independent sibling of TRIZ?
• S4. Does SCAMPER descend from TRIZ, or from a separate lineage?
• S5. What shared assumption unites all three (if any)?
• S6. What does each method treat as the unit of work (product, contradiction, checklist item)?
• S7. How do popular names (Systematic vs Systemic Inventive Thinking) confuse the landscape?
• S8. Where do ASIT and USIT sit relative to SIT and TRIZ?

P2. What is the core mechanism of TRIZ?

• S1. What three findings did Altshuller’s patent research produce?
• S2. What is a technical contradiction versus a physical contradiction?
• S3. How do the 40 Inventive Principles and Contradiction Matrix work together?
• S4. What is the Ideal Final Result (IFR) and why does it matter?
• S5. What is ARIZ and when is it needed versus lighter TRIZ tools?
• S6. What are the laws of technical system evolution used for?
• S7. How does TRIZ distinguish levels of invention?
• S8. What industry evidence exists that TRIZ delivers ROI (and how strong is it)?

P3. What is the core mechanism of SIT?

• S1. Why was TRIZ simplified into SIT in 1990s Israel?
• S2. What are the five thinking tools, precisely?
• S3. What is the Closed World principle, and who formulated it?
• S4. What is Function Follows Form in SIT practice?
• S5. How does Path of Most Resistance fight cognitive fixedness?
• S6. What is a “virtual product” and the FFF sequence?
• S7. What academic/commercial artifacts (HBR, Inside the Box, SIT Ltd) define the method today?
• S8. How does SIT handle non-product domains (service, process, marketing)?

P4. What is the core mechanism of SCAMPER?

• S1. How did Osborn’s checklist become Eberle’s mnemonic?
• S2. What does each letter ask the thinker to do?
• S3. Is SCAMPER generative, evaluative, or both?
• S4. Why is SCAMPER so common in education and design-thinking workshops?
• S5. Where does SCAMPER fail (superficiality, open-world drift)?
• S6. How does SCAMPER relate to classical brainstorming rules?
• S7. Can SCAMPER be used without a starting product?
• S8. What empirical evidence exists for SCAMPER effectiveness?

P5. How do the three methods compare on structure, scope, and learning cost?

• S1. Complexity and training time?
• S2. Domain fit (engineering vs marketing vs education)?
• S3. Closed-world vs open-world resource rules?
• S4. Pattern count and cognitive load?
• S5. Suitability for solo work vs facilitated groups?
• S6. Overlap of operators (Eliminate/Subtraction, Combine, etc.)?
• S7. What decision rule should a practitioner use to pick one?
• S8. When should methods be sequenced rather than chosen?

P6. What cognitive science explains why structured methods help?

• S1. What is functional fixedness (Duncker) and how do tools attack it?
• S2. Why can quantity-first brainstorming harm originality?
• S3. Why do constraints sometimes increase creativity (closed world)?
• S4. What is the difference between divergent prompting and contradiction resolution?
• S5. Does template-based ideation transfer across domains?
• S6. How do these methods relate to analogical transfer?
• S7. What failure modes remain even with structure (ritual, cargo-cult)?
• S8. How does facilitation skill interact with method quality?

P7. What are the strongest criticisms and failure modes?

• S1. Is TRIZ overhyped relative to controlled evidence?
• S2. Is the classical Contradiction Matrix outdated for software/AI systems?
• S3. Does SIT’s closed world trap teams in incrementalism?
• S4. Is SCAMPER just a relabeling of common sense?
• S5. Do vendor/consulting interests inflate claims?
• S6. What happens when methods are applied without problem definition quality?
• S7. How do these compare to Design Thinking’s known limits?
• S8. When is unstructured exploration still superior?

P8. How do these methods interact with modern AI and EmTech practice?

• S1. Can LLMs execute SCAMPER/SIT/TRIZ operators as prompts?
• S2. Does AI amplify checklist methods more than deep TRIZ?
• S3. What is lost when the human no longer feels fixedness friction?
• S4. Can TRIZ laws of evolution inform technology forecasting today?
• S5. Where do structured methods fit agentic product/process design?
• S6. Risk of plausible-but-shallow AI-generated “innovations”?
• S7. What hybrid human+AI workflow is most defensible?
• S8. Is there a trend of digitizing inventive patterns (software TRIZ, AI SIT)?

P9. What concrete worked examples make each method legible?

• S1. Classic SIT product examples (subtraction, etc.)?
• S2. Classic TRIZ contradiction examples?
• S3. Classic SCAMPER product/service examples?
• S4. A single product run through all three methods side by side?
• S5. Service / process examples, not only hardware?
• S6. Failed or weak examples that show limits?
• S7. Story-worthy origin moments (Altshuller Gulag, Israeli simplification)?
• S8. Enterprise adoption cases (Samsung TRIZ, etc.) and caveats?

P10. What should a decision-maker do with this map?

• S1. Minimum viable training path for a team?
• S2. Method choice by problem type matrix?
• S3. Governance: when is structured ideation required vs optional?
• S4. How to measure whether the method helped (idea quality metrics)?
• S5. Integration with stage-gate / lean startup / design thinking?
• S6. What to teach first to non-engineers?
• S7. What remains unresolved for enterprise rollout?
• S8. Recommended reading stack (primary over secondary)?

Rabbit holes

ID	Trigger	Status
R1	Liberating Structures “TRIZ” is not engineering TRIZ	Closed — note name collision in TRIZ section
R2	ASIT / USIT as parallel TRIZ simplifications	Integrated in comparison
R3	Filkovsky → Goldenberg/Horowitz Israeli TRIZ→SIT bridge	Integrated in SIT history
R4	Patent-count claims (40k vs 200k) inconsistency	Flagged as source variance
R5	AI promptization of operators	Integrated in AI section
R6	Design Thinking vs structured inventive methods empirical study	Integrated in comparison/contrarian

Unresolved

Question	Reason
Controlled multi-site RCTs comparing TRIZ vs SIT vs SCAMPER on identical problems with blinded idea scoring	Literature is mostly case studies, teaching studies, and vendor reports
Current MATRIZ-standard “canonical” TRIZ toolset boundary vs commercial variants (I-TRIZ, TOP-TRIZ)	Fragmented schools; not settled for non-specialists
Whether closed-world SIT systematically underperforms on radical category creation	Limited independent longitudinal evidence

Story seeds

Altshuller’s 1950 arrest after criticizing invention policy; TRIZ continued after Gulag release.
Israeli researchers compress Soviet TRIZ into five teachable tools and “inside the box.”
Osborn’s advertising checklist becomes a children’s creativity game mnemonic (SCAMPER).

Tech tree

Osborn checklist (1953) → Eberle SCAMPER (1971) [parallel branch]
Altshuller patent analysis (1946–) → TRIZ tools → Filkovsky Israel → Goldenberg/Horowitz SIT (mid-1990s) → Boyd & Goldenberg Inside the Box (2013)