"Most product and service providers have always faced the perplexing question–What will be the market requirements tomorrow?"

Directed Evolution® provides a means not only to predict but to direct future technological achievements in a given time frame with a specified level of support. Most of the innovations that will appear over the next 30-40 years will be based upon scientific and technological knowledge existing in the current years. As it were even in the past. Today’s technology was born a decade ago. The difficulty however lies in identifying what knowledge is of real significance. In time, what seems obscure today will be remarkably clear tomorrow.  

The role of Directed Evolution® is to evaluate today's knowledge systematically, thereby identifying what is achievable, and more particularly, how one technological advance, perhaps in conjunction with another, could fulfill a human need. 

Taking the above into consideration, the main feature of Directed Evolution is its pro-active approach to the evolution of technology. Instead of making a prediction and waiting for it to be confirmed, the DE process uses numerous patterns and lines of evolution for the purpose of identifying possible scenarios, analyzing them, selecting the most promising ones, then planning the process of implementation. 

Altshuller in his research documented the "natural" quality progression of products, discovered a series of repeatable patterns he called The Laws of Technological Systems Evolution.

The  Patterns of Evolution are listed below (which includes those discovered by I-TRIZ originator Genrich Altshuller) together with added patterns and over 400 additional Lines of Evolution discovered by Zlotin and Zusman and their research team. The process has been applied around the world, not only to products but to markets, industries, organizations, technologies, processes, and services. 

The eight selected patterns below have more than 400 detailed lines supporting them: 

1.Evolution along an S-curve.
2.Evolution towards increased ideality.
3.Non-uniform development of systems’ elements.
4.Evolution towards increased dynamism and controllability
5.Evolution towards integration/structuralization.  
6.Evolution with matching/mismatching
7.Evolution toward the multi-level.
8.Evolution towards decreasing human involvement 

David Patrishkoff (Innovative Solutions Group) believes Altshuller's science -- and some "very interesting" patent strategies -- can help him "control the competition" through technology forecasting. He says – "I-TRIZ is high-speed R&D, generating ideas at least 20 times faster than normal R&D groups."