The TRIZ community identified that one kind of Contradiction is a Technical Contradiction: when you improve one thing, something else gets worse as a consequence. A huge amount of patent research uncovered that these Technical Contradictions and their solutions follow patterns. The Contradiction Matrix was developed from this analysis, so when you have a Technical Contradiction, you can look up in the Matrix which of the 40 Inventive Principles have been used most often in the past to create a clever solution. See Chapter 3 for more on how to uncover and define your Contradictions.