It was in the naval patent office that Altshuller first discovered the tenets that would lead him to TRIZ, discerning a common pattern of solutions to technical problems across a diversity of fields. The first thing he did with his theory, however, was find a new way to put his foot in his mouth. Concerned over the dismal state of the Soviet Union after World War II, Altshuller and an associate, Rafael Shapiro, wrote an earnest letter to Stalin.

"They wrote a letter that stated that the country was in ruins after World War II, and that there were not many resources to recover it," says Fey. "He suggested to use TRIZ. Of course he had to prove this, so Altshuller put together a graph of innovation, and found there were two valleys in the graph. One was in 1937, with Stalin's first pogrom, and the other was in wartime." In 1949, Altshuller was arrested, interrogated and tortured. Finally, he "confessed," as had so many other "dissidents" before him, and was sentenced to 25 years in the infamous Vorkuta labor camp, at the northern tip of the Ural Mountains, above the Arctic Circle.

"He was in jail because, No. 1, he was Jewish," says Bar-El in his thick Israeli accent, "and because it's against the law to make the Russian people creative."

Stalin's most brutal despotism, though, couldn't dim Altshuller's creativity. Until his death in 1998, Altshuller burned as brightly as any of Edison's filaments, and often in just as rarefied an environment as a vacuum; much of his work was done while he was imprisoned in the gulag.

"Altshuller was in the labor camp along with many other representatives of the intelligentsia," says Fey. "He realized that in order to survive, not physically but mostly spiritually and mentally, he had to ask these people to teach him. Every night after they went back to the barracks, they would teach him: physics, math, art history, literature, whatever was available. This allowed these people to survive longer than they would have without Altshuller."

Zlotin, who worked with Altshuller in Russia for nearly two decades, relates his surprise at discovering Altshuller's vast knowledge of Verdi operas: "I said, how do you know these? You had time to go to opera? He said, 'Never, but my neighbor in the barracks was the world's best specialist on Verdi's music, and he would sing me all his operas at night.'

"For Altshuller, this camp was first a place of education," Zlotin says in his heavily accented English. "He studied 14, 16 hours per day, and in this way he had huge knowledge in pretty unexpectable areas."

It was this wide-ranging knowledge across "unexpectable" areas that allowed Altshuller to develop a problem-solving methodology applicable to just about any discipline you'd care to name. Inventor David Levy, whose portfolio includes work on the functional layout of the Apple PowerBook, calls the methodology "tremendous." (Though he does not use TRIZ formally, Levy says his practices naturally echo those found in the discipline.) "The most exciting part about TRIZ is, it's not limited to how to make a widget," says Levy. "It's how to approach problem solving, it's how to approach relationships, it's how to approach societal problems. It's really how to be creative and to observe the world and solve problems."

TRIZ leads engineers to generate potential solutions at a much faster rate than mere brainstorming would. "I'm used to seeing novel ideas once every six months -- if your engineer wakes up on the right side of the bed," says David Patrishkoff, chief technology officer and head of R&D at Dura, a maker of specialty automotive parts. With TRIZ, "we're seeing dozens and dozens of novel ideas. I am totally excited."

Patrishkoff believes Altshuller's science -- and some "very interesting" patent strategies -- can help him "control the competition" through technology forecasting. "TRIZ is high-speed R&D, generating ideas at least 20 times faster than normal R&D groups," Patrishkoff says excitedly. "Do we patent them all?" Patrishkoff is considering a form of "patent fencing" in which high-level innovations developed through TRIZ might be published as a "trap" for competitors. Broader ideas, meanwhile, on which the published concepts depended, would be pushed through the patent process. "Even if we don't get market share, we're going to pick up on royalties," he grins.

Altshuller, if he's listening, must be spinning in his grave. He was probably among the first to mine patent files -- his original theories were based on a survey of more than 40,000 patents, and current databases used by computer-based TRIZ programs cover millions -- but he is more the Charles Ives of science than an early venture capital cowboy. Just as Ives refused to copyright his musical compositions, Altshuller always insisted that his ideas remain in the public domain, say those who knew him, and he was not particularly happy when TRIZ's stateside commercialization began.

"Altshuller said TRIZ is not for this," says Zlotin. "TRIZ should be only for all human beings to get." Now chief scientist at Ideation International, a TRIZ consultancy, Zlotin describes Altshuller as "Communist, but not idiotic Communist like people who like power. He was Communist in the sense of Jesus Christ; he wanted to make, for all people, something good."

"Altshuller wasn't interested in designing another gadget or another gizmo," says Fey, who runs a consultancy called the TRIZ Group and teaches TRIZ at Indiana's Wayne State University. "TRIZ was perceived by him as a way to develop creative people." To that end, a large part of Altshuller's efforts in Russia consisted of establishing education programs in schools and colleges throughout the country. According to Ideation's Bar-El, there are similar programs at universities in 25 countries around the world.

Bar-El, perhaps more than anyone else, is responsible for bringing TRIZ to the United States in an organized fashion. A former microchip engineer and marketing manager, he was semiretired when TRIZ was first brought to his attention by a friend, in early 1992. "I was ready to move to Las Vegas and buy a 7-Eleven," he says, graying curls peeking from his open shirt collar.

By 1993, he and two partners had tracked down TRIZ scholars in Israel and Russia, including Altshuller, and had hired two of them, Zlotin and his wife, Alla Zusman, as the core of a new company. With aerospace and automotive engineering concern Allied Signal (now part of Honeywell) as its first customer, Ideation set about solving problems that had stumped the company's top engineers. By 1994 it was pulling down more than a million dollars a year in revenues, a figure that's expected to approach $10 million by the end of 2000 -- not bad for a company promoting the "new science" of an obscure Soviet-era inventor who spent some of his best years in a labor camp.

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