**2.1 The ordeal**

Having revealed the universal nature of the inter-s-curve journey, the original TRIZ researchers shifted their attention to the contradiction part of the story, and began mapping all of the attributes of solutions that customers wanted to improve, and all of the other attributes that emerged to impede those improvements.

#### *Systematic e-Service Innovation DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96463*

The resulting list of parameters was very finite. In a technical context, the latest Contradiction mapping tool identifies just fifty relevant attributes [8]. When the Systematic Innovation research extended the same contradiction attribute search into the world of business, the eventual list comprised forty-five parameters [9]. In the IT world, the list is currently twenty-one parameters [10]. The e-Service world, then, effectively becomes a combination of the latter two parameter lists. Because the primary research underpinning all three tools begins from empirical grounds, there is always the likelihood that more parameters will be revealed in the future. The job in this context is to keep looking, and, more specifically, keep looking for exceptions rather than confirmation that the lists might already be complete.

What this research has then gone on to reveal, having identified the existence of pairs of conflicting parameter, are the strategies that the 2% innovators have used to successfully resolve the Ordeal conflicts. Here the most surprising finding is that the list of possible strategies – whether for technical, business or e-service (or, for that matter, architecture, biology, literature, music, and all other domains of human endeavour) - is even more finite. Since the mid-1970s, in fact, the list has remained static at forty [8–10]. This, again, is not to say that this will be the eventual final total, but rather that, at this this point in time, these are the only forty strategies that prospective innovators need to have in their Ordealsolving armoury. **Figure 3** illustrates an example of the Business version of the contradiction solving tool, showing how conflicting parameters are mapped onto the relevant rows and columns of the Matrix so that users can then be provided with a ranked list of the forty Principles used in the past to resolve similar contradictions.

In some ways, these Matrix tools and the list of forty 'Inventive Principles' form the foundation of 'systematic'. In others, stepping back to look at other firstprinciple characteristics of the 2%, it also becomes clear that while the principle of contradiction-solving is a necessary component of success, it is by no means sufficient. In order to reach sufficiency, it is necessary to connect three other elements to the Hero's Journey. The next concerns directionality…

**Figure 3.** *Example mapping of e-service ordeal onto the business contradiction matrix [8].*
