TRIZ AND COMPUTER AIDED INVENTING Sergei Ikovenko Professor Adjunctis (MIT, Cambridge, USA), International TRIZ Association (MA TRIZ) TRIZ (Theory for Inventive Problem Solving) being one of the most powerful inventing methodologies is sophisticated and requires considerable time and efforts to master. There have been and are multiple projects on developing various software packages that would make TRIZ usage and applications more user-friendly and shorten the TRIZ learning curve. Software packages that address this issue are one of the first computer aided inventing tools known. This direction of CAI has become much more active when TRIZ started its integration with other engineering methods – Value Engineering Analysis (VEA), Root-Cause Analysis (RCA), Lean Thinking, Six Sigma, Functional Analysis and others. Several software packages assist engineers with documenting data, building component and function models, and automatically calculating function rank of the components of the system. Performing a function-based information search is one of the tasks where computerized support is helping if finding new functions for improving complex systems. The next step is to identify other systems in which similar functions are performed better. The principles used to achieve similar functions in other fields can then be adapted to improve the system at hand. Developing powerful tools for Function Based Information Search to enable the substitution of inventing problems with adaptation problems is predicted to be one of major directions of CAI development Computer-Aided Inventing, TRIZ, TRIZ++, Root-Cause Analysis, Evolutionary Analysis. Abstract: Key words: