STIMULATING CREATIVITY: A MORE PRACTICAL ALTERNATIVE TO TRIZ

Being able to stimulate creative ideas on demand is a desire for engineers, scientists and artists alike. Creative stimuli in the form of the TRIZ inventive principles have shown much potential, however the industrial uptake of such stimuli is limited due to the practicalities of using this TRIZ approach. The following paper proposes a practical alternative to producing creative stimuli termed Sweeper and tests both approaches during industrial brainstorm sessions. The results showed that all creative stimuli tools were of benefit. The Sweeper tool performed best in terms of the rate of idea production and levelled the TRIZ tool in terms of the quality of ideas.