TRIZ

You're stuck on a contradiction — making it faster makes it less reliable, making it cheaper makes it less effective. The team has accepted the trade-off as physics. You suspect someone, somewhere, has already broken it.

TRIZ (Teoriya Resheniya Izobretatelskikh Zadatch — Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) is Genrich Altshuller's systematic innovation methodology. Starting in 1946, Altshuller studied hundreds of thousands of patents to identify the patterns that actually produce inventive solutions. You apply 40 inventive principles, contradiction matrices, and the concept of ideality to tackle problems systematically rather than relying on inspiration.