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…

The last thing that we want to deal with as problem-solves is to waste our time on routine boring work, like copy-pasting data from one system to another. In many cases, we all already keep data in Excel sheets or something similar, so why would anyone need to invest the time before s/he can start working with that data? From now, you don’t have to! Following a number of requests, we just released a new feature that enables you to import data from CSV directly into the tool, and it takes seconds. The import is currently available on 3 tools:…

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…

We are excited to announce that we have recently released an additional creative thinking tool: Perception Mapping (PMap). In this post, we want to describe what is it good for and why should anyone use it. What is Perception Mapping? Perception mapping (PMap) is a creative thinking tool that allows finding blockers (barriers) that prevent achieving a certain goal. When one creates a plan of how to achieve something, he will typically build a list of things needed for it, list of actions to be taken. It is no doubt that all these actions (perceptions) are good and aim to…

In the majority of cases, we don’t have the luxury to work on a single project. Our lives often force us to deal with several projects simultaneously. In this post, we will discuss the best way how to manage several projects simultaneously. The Problem Managing two or more projects simultaneously is a problem that can be solved using problem-solving (creative thinking) tools. Let’s zoom out and take a look at the whole picture, including the System, Subsystem, and Supersystem. Subsystem contains a part of the System, while Supersystem contains the System (as one of its parts).For example: If three is…

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…

Tasks prioritization is a key instrument for making your work more effective. If you want to achieve more with less, and if you want to waste less time for output and instead be outcome-oriented, then task prioritization is mandatory. Tasks prioritization is a typical management tool, but it is useful for managers, engineers, and technicians because it tool helps to manage your personal activity, improves the efficiency of your work, increases impact, and evidently helps your promotion. In this article, we want to concentrate on how to define urgency and importance correctly. Urgency – Importance Matrix Urgency – Importance Matrix is…

It is about problem solving tools. “You never saw such a commotion up and down a house, in all your life, as when my Uncle Podger undertook to do a job.” – this is from “Three Men in a Boat” by Jerome K. Jerome, chapter “Uncle Podger hangs a picture”. You can enjoy reading the famous book again and again, but this particular chapter exactly corresponds to our topic, creative thinking tools.  What is most important to our topic is that Uncle Podger used tools: “Now you go and get me my hammer, Will,” he would shout; “and you bring…