About the Author

Lilly Haines-Gadd’s life changed as a result of TRIZ. After a music degree at King’s College London, she worked as a management consultant, solving business problems for telecoms companies. When she joined Oxford Creativity in 2004 it was to run the business, but she discovered TRIZ was useful for everyone – and through applying TRIZ on business problems, she found that her way of thinking had totally changed. This led to her retraining in Psychology, studying at Oxford Brookes, Cardiff University, and completing an MSc in Occupational Psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her dissertation was evaluating the impact of TRIZ training at an individual and organisational level. She is trained in delivering various psychometric measures and is a member of the British Psychological Society.

In addition to running the company, she delivers training, facilitates innovative problem-solving workshops and develops new workshops, materials and methods for learning TRIZ. She is interested in how TRIZ makes everyone a better problem solver and a more creative thinker – whatever their natural approach to problems. Through her extensive hands-on experience of problem solving and TRIZ training, she has observed that TRIZ not only gives individuals great clarity of thought but also gets diverse teams working together, communicating more effectively and thinking differently.

Lilly is still a keen musician, singing in several choirs in Oxford, and is improving her Italian.

Author’s Acknowledgements

Firstly, to my mother, Karen Gadd, for introducing me to TRIZ and supporting and encouraging me throughout my TRIZ journey. It’s been a real joy to work with her on developing new ways of teaching and using TRIZ. Without her, this book wouldn’t have been possible.

My colleagues at Oxford Creativity have also contributed much to our work and logic: Andrew Martin, Neil Sherry, Andrea Mica, Ron Donaldson and Frederic Mathis, Merryn Haines-Gadd, Geoffrey Haines and Michael Haines have been enormously helpful in providing, discussing and refining ideas for the book.

There have been many others in the TRIZ community who have informed my thinking and taught me a great deal about TRIZ, most notably Dr Sergei Ikovenko and Ellen Domb.

The people I have taught and facilitated in TRIZ workshops have all taught me something new, but some of my clients and friends in particular have provided examples, helpful feedback and fresh thinking, including Neal Symmons, Peter Knowles, Kent Haell, Mark Veevers, David Drummond, Alastair Clarke, Mike McMenamin, Emily Lloyd and Rebecca Rue.

Enrico Sorrentino has been a constant source of inspiration and support.

Thanks to Annie Knight, Vicki Adang, Kate O’Leary, Daniel Mersey of Word Mountain Creative Content, Iona Everson, Rachael Chilvers and the rest of the team at Wiley for their unfailingly cheerful guidance and hard work throughout the process of preparing this book.

Publisher’s Acknowledgements

Commissioning Editor: Annie Knight

Project Manager: Victoria M. Adang

Development Editor: Daniel Mersey of Word Mountain Creative Content

Copy Editor: Kate O’Leary

Technical Editor: Karen Gadd

Art Coordinator: Alicia B. South

Production Editor: Kumar Chellappan

Cover Image: © yod67/Shutterstock