Systematic Ideation Effectiveness Study of TRIZ

The objective of this paper is to present experimental results of a specific ideation method: TRIZ. Our hypothesis is that TRIZ improves the creativity of subjects using it as observed in the produced design outcomes. The experiments were conducted simultaneously at two institutions: University of Texas at El Paso and University of Maryland. The same ideation task was used at both institutions, a redesign of a traffic light that uses Light-emitting Diodes (LED) instead of incandescent bulbs challenging the designer subject with the issue of snow accumulation since LED’s do not melt the snow. The assessment was performed on the outcome (i.e., ideas generated) using quantity, novelty and variety as metrics. Numerical results show that using TRIZ improved the Novelty and Variety of the concepts generated by students at both institutions.