and seems useful to nearly any engineer. However, teaching TRIZ entails serious problems caused by misunderstanding of basic TRIZ concepts by students. In this paper, we suggest shifting the focus of elementary TRIZ education from the concept of contradiction to a more common and easier understandable concept of disadvantage. The category “contradiction”, in relation to engineering systems, is rather diffi cult to understand for unexperienced people. The shift of focus to a more common category of “disadvantage” considerably simplifi es teaching basic ideas of TRIZ. Then, we can teach students the concept of contradiction as continuation and extension of the previous topic. Our practical experience con fi rmed that the skills of such students in real-world problem solving improved better comparing to those who learned TRIZ in the common way.

Keywords: TRIZ, education, disadvantage, contradiction, principles, trends, standard

solutions.

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