Creativity, Learning Techniques and TRIZ

Creativity and innovation are acquiring a foremost importance in the scientific and engineering world. TRIZ offers a systematic approach for problem solving, still it requires creativity abilities when translating the recommendations offered by inventive principles and standard inventive solutions into the specific domain of the problem. Goal of this paper is to show that creativity can be enhanced if the learning process is better understood and how strongly learning and creativity training are linked. The technologist who wants to be a lifelong learner and a creative professional inventor can profit from different techniques that cognitive psychology proved to be effective for learning, like metaphor, story and visualization, focused and diffuse modes of thinking, interleaving and how to overcome Einstellung. Their commonalities and relationships with problem solving approaches will be explained. Different learning techniques can be mapped to already well known TRIZ tools, giving them a neuroscientific foundation. Often TRIZ practitioners in a corporate environment are called to facilitate TRIZ sessions with very little time allocated. Being effective in a short time is crucial to enhance trust and leverage application. Several sessions at GE Global Research Munich offered a chance to compare different approaches and observe how to boost the idea sparking process, even in situations where the facilitator is not a subject matter expert or the inventive team has little or no background in TRIZ.