Measuring Motivation and Innovation Skills in Advanced Course in New Product Development and Inventive Problem Solving with TRIZ for Mechanical Engineering Students

The paper is addressing the needs of the universities regarding qualification of students as future R&D specialists in efficient techniques for successfully running innovation process. It briefly describes the program of a novel one-semester-course of 150 hours in new product development and inventive problem solving with TRIZ methodology, offered for the master students at the Beuth University of Applied Sciences in Berlin. The paper outlines multi-source educational approach, which includes a new product development project (about 50% of the complete course), theory, practical work, self-learning with the software tools for computer-aided innovation, and demonstrates examples of the students work. The research part analyses the learning experience, identifies the factors that impact the innovation and problem solving performance of the students, and underlines the main difficulties faced by the students in the course. It describes a method for measurement of education efficiency and compares the results with educational experience in the industry. The presented results can help universities to establish the education in new product development or to improve its performance.