In today’s rapidly changing world, problem-solving and critical thinking skills are becoming more crucial than ever. One specific skill that can help individuals creatively solve problems is engineering thinking. In schools and universities, we teach math, physics, biology, programming, and many other tools. This is great! Knowing tools is extremely important. Unfortunately, despite its high demand, the current education system often neglects this very important skill called Engineering Thinking. The consequences of this neglect are significant. Without engineering thinking, students are not fully equipped to tackle real-world problems they may encounter in their future careers. Many students may find themselves…

Our life is full of changes. We change apartments, cars, work, accept a new position, start learning, etc. We make a lot of changes at our work too – maintain equipment, clean the products, change vendors, and hire or fire people. And we can continue the list of possible changes endlessly. The question is, do we need these changes or not? Are they innovations or just changes? In most cases, people don’t bother much to analyze or even think about the reason for any change they make. Here, let’s do the simple analysis that everyone should do. And we’ll do…

Our work and our lives are full of tasks. How to manage the priority of these tasks? This is a problem. Since this is a problem it should be solved with a help of a problem-solving tool. One of the most popular tools is Urgency – Importance Matrix (UIM). We have already published a number of blogs about the UIM in the past: Here, we want to publish a brief presentation about how to use UIM with the help of the PRIZ Guru platform. Start to manage your tasks priority with PRIZ online platform! LOGIN to PRIZ Innovation Platform and…

Nowadays, remote work is becoming more relevant than ever before. In innovation and problem-solving projects, it sometimes feels like an impossible task, as these projects require the ongoing collaboration of the entire team. We are excited to announce that we have recently released a feature in the PRIZ Innovation Platform which allows remote teams to work on innovations and solve problems more effectively. Why teamwork? You can find many articles on the internet discussing and analyzing the benefits of teamwork. We can recommend some of them: Group vs. Individual Projects: Which Is Best? , 6 Benefits of Teamwork in the…

ME59700 INNOVATION AND PROBLEM-SOLVING WITH AN EMPHASIS ON TRIZ TOOLS School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University Target Audience You have hard problems that have eluded solution for months or even years. You want to be a problem solver but haven’t found a framework that takes you beyond mere concepts without quantification (many popular design theories or idea generation methods). You want to perform work that cannot be commoditized or automated or replaced by Artificial Intelligence. Your problem may be any of product/service/organization/policy design or analysis. Course Material Understanding the objective function, developing problem representation and system modeling based on…

Moore’s law drives all hi-tech and innovations. “Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.” This was published in 1949 in Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science. Computer manufacturing began in 1943. (Fig.1) This optimistic statement appeared because semiconductor transistor had already been invented and began aggressively replacing huge vacuum electronic tubes in all devices including computers. Computers became smaller because a transistor is much smaller than a vacuum tube. Nevertheless, nobody could imagine that in about 10 years, Integrated Circuit (IC) would be invented and high volume microchip manufacturing would begin its fast development….