Functional modeling for TRIZ-based evolutionary analyses

TRIZ literature presents several papers and even books claiming the efficiency of Altshuller's Laws of Engineering System Evolution as a means for producing technology forecasts. Nevertheless, all the instruments and the procedures proposed so far suffer from poor repeatability, while the increasing adoption of innovation as the key factor for being competitive requires reliable and repeatable methods and tools for the analysis of emerging technologies and their potential impact. The present paper proposes an original algorithm to perform a functional analysis aimed at building a Network of Evolutionary Trends for a given Technical System with repeatable steps. Such a goal has been achieved by integrating well known models and instruments for system description and function representation. The overall procedure has been already validated in a number of industrial case studies and it's here clarified by means of an example about the production of tablets in the pharmaceutical manufacturing sector.