I attended a very interesting workshop at Bath on BioTRIZ yesterday. BioTRIZ is an amalgamation of TRIZ (the acronym originating from Russian meaning "the theory of inventive problem solving") and biomimetics. TRIZ is an empirical theory of invention. Its main contribution is in formulating a set of basic principles of innovation. These principles — there are forty of them — are, figuratively speaking, symbols of the alphabet of a language for cross-domain interpretation of innovation ideas.