This study reconceptualizes negotiation as a structured process of contradiction resolution by applying the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) to the analysis of strategic negotiation behavior. Negotiation theory has developed both rich descriptive accounts of psychological and behavioral dynamics and prescriptive frameworks for rational decision-making, yet the systematic creative transformation of constraint sets—how negotiators redesign the problem space rather than merely optimize within it—remains undertheorized. We argue that many core negotiation dilemmas constitute physical contradictions in the TRIZ sense: situations in which a single system must simultaneously satisfy opposing requirements. The study applies TRIZ’s four separation principles—time, space, condition, and whole–part separation—to these contradictions and develops a mapping procedure linking contradiction identification to separation principles, inventive principles, and observable tactics. Ten negotiation tactics drawn from the extensively documented public record of Donald J. Trump's business and political negotiations serve as an empirical illustration in a theory-building case study design, selected as an extreme case that renders structural patterns maximally visible. We situate TRIZ within the broader landscape of creative problem-solving frameworks—including brainstorming, lateral thinking, Design Thinking, and SCAMPER—and argue for its distinctive suitability due to its contradiction-specific, algorithmic structure. The proposed framework, termed Negotiation Engineering, integrates the precision of engineering design with the behavioral complexity of negotiation, offering implications for negotiation theory, pedagogy, and AI-assisted decision support. Limitations of the single-case design and the partial applicability of TRIZ to non-formalizable negotiation dimensions are explicitly acknowledged.
Chung et al. (Tue,) studied this question.