On the Efficiency of Teaching TRIZ: Experiences in a French Engineering School
Résumé
Our industry is currently undergoing a transformation that is guiding it from the quality era to that of innovation. This transformation necessarily involves changing design practices, the foundations of which currently rest on an optimization mentality. An innovation oriented approach would require that the bases of the design action contain other rules of invention where creativity and problem solving would have priority. In order to address these requirements, some teaching institutions have initially resorted to teaching creativity methods by simply stimulating the ideation phases of standard design processes. Having reached the limit of what creativity methods could contribute; TRIZ appears as a likely alternative to such methods by providing greater structure and more results. However, the first experiments in teaching TRIZ rapidly revealed an incompatibility between the time needed for effectively using it and the time generally allotted for teaching a new method. This article presents the results of an experiment in introducing new TRIZ software and the way in which it was implemented in engineering students' coursework at INSA-Strasbourg over the past three years. These results lead us to state that the use of software improves quality in the TRIZ teaching process, especially with regard to the number of skills dealt with and acquired by engineering students in project situations