Bar-El, chief executive of Ideation International, rambles on, introducing chief technology officers, professors and a handful of journalists from Japan. He is apologetic about gathering his audience in this out-of-the-way New England burg, and promises that "next year will be Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Hawaii, one of those." None of the places he names seems any more fitting a venue in which to discuss a revolutionary new science, but to the tenacious little group at the Sheraton, that's exactly the point. They've descended on Nashua for the weekend -- about 100 of them, all told -- to confer on a discipline whose basic tenets include the notion that the best ideas are often to be found in the least likely of places.

The "science of inventive problem solving," which they've come to discuss, is certainly one of those unlikely places. Originally developed in 1940s Soviet Russia by Genrich Altshuller, a young naval patent agent, TRIZ, as it's known by its Russian acronym, seems at first nothing more than another tired exhortation to think outside the box. But closer inspection reveals a highly refined set of tools and patent and technology databases in use by engineers in some of America's biggest companies. Ford Motor Co. used the "science" to solve an idle-vibration problem, resulting in a handful of new patents for the company. DaimlerChrysler looked into the future of steering column technology. Johnson & Johnson developed new feminine hygiene products.

While it's a source of pride for any inventor to see the fruits of his labor in use around the world, friends and associates say that Altshuller, who died in 1998, had loftier intentions for his science. Having begun life as a scientist, Altshuller ended it as a visionary. His transformative experience was a stay in Joseph Stalin's labor camps, where he watched the Russian intelligentsia imprisoned there die off practically unnoticed. But far from dousing Altshuller's creative flame, the experience only fanned his idealism. He may have set out in his work to teach a shorter route to innovation, but he concluded with the idea that innovation might provide a surer road to a free society.

Altshuller saw TRIZ as nothing less than the solution to the world's social ills, not merely a way to grease the wheels of technological progress. He hoped his work would liberate people's minds. But thus far it has been used only as a problem-solving technique, albeit successfully: Engineers at companies like Boeing, Kodak, National Semiconductor, Northern Telecom and even NASA are applying the methodology with startlingly impressive results. It may be a low-tech solution for a high-tech world, but it may also be a more lasting answer than things like software agents and total-quality-management packages. In fact, TRIZ may be a solution that transcends technology altogether.

On an engineering level, TRIZ works, say those familiar with it, by breaking down the process of problem solving and innovation into discrete elements, each of which is expanded through concrete techniques to catalyze engineers' thinking along specific lines. Nowhere in the methodology is there to be found so facile an instruction as "Let your mind roam free." As Altshuller writes, "It is not enough to say, 'Extend your imaginative thinking about something.' The methods for achieving this must be explained." Part of TRIZ's task is to explain these methods by using the host of technical principles culled by Altshuller and his disciples through close examination of innovations gone by.

It was Altshuller's stroke of brilliance to view the problems of engineering and innovation in terms of technical contradictions, the concept around which TRIZ pivots. "An invention is the removal of technical contradictions," Altshuller writes, and a moment's reflection proves him correct.

Even the incandescent bulb, perhaps the world's most famous invention, was made possible by the resolution of a technical contradiction. Electric current passing through metal filaments produced light as early as 1801, but the filaments burned themselves out too quickly to be of use. The contradiction: The filaments must burn hot enough to produce light but not so hot as to consume themselves. It was not until the late 1870s that Sir Joseph Wilson Swan and Thomas Alva Edison resolved the contradiction. Placing the filaments in a vacuum allowed them to produce light without burning themselves out too quickly.

One contradiction that TRIZ has not managed to resolve is that between Altshuller's idealism and the current rush to commercialize his work. Though Altshuller was no doubt aware there was money to be made through the application of TRIZ, he insisted that the science itself remain in the public's hands -- just as biology and mathematics, say, are the property of anyone who can grasp them. Altshuller certainly would have been startled to find someone hawking the movie rights to TRIZ.

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