From TRIZ to Inventive Design Method (IDM): towards a formalization of Inventive Practices in R&D Departments

In today’s methodological world, TRIZ has undoubtedly its place in the myriad of methods and tools useful for engineers in companies. Mostly dedicated for solving inventive problems, TRIZ is appreciated for its capacity to widen the scope of possible domains in which the solution is sought after. In that regards, it is often perceived by companies as a potential replacer of creativity techniques such as Brainstorming. We disagree with this statement in presenting TRIZ as, firstly, a theoretical framework for inventive thinking, second, as any theory, it aims to serve as a framework for developing new methods and tools useful in a certain context. Inventive Design Method (IDM) has been developed to re-structure and complete TRIZ body of knowledge with other theories like graph theory or Pugh’s theory. The objective is to integrate companies’ set of methods to pragmatically serve an innovation strategy with engineering tools open to invention. This advanced seminar is provided to describe, with concrete exercises, the main stages of IDM.