Nurturing creative engineering graduates by embedding creativity heuristics into existing subjects

Although some researchers shared their successes in developing creativity skills of engineering students, a significant number of recent publications on instilling creativity skills in engineering graduates reported on failures of engineering education to develop creative graduates that can succeed in extremely competitive world of the 21st Century. This paper searches for the ways and the means that engineering educators can use to succeed in developing creativity skills of their graduates in the era of exponential expansion of discipline knowledge. Guided by the definition of engineering creativity that was developed specifically for engineering, it considers the stages of engineering design that require creativity skills the most and reviews research evidence on successful teaching of creativity in engineering by embedding simple thinking heuristics into existing discipline subjects. This paper focuses on research evidence related to suitability of thinking heuristics developed by the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ). So far it has been found that TRIZ heuristics of Size-Time-Cost Operator, the Eight Fields of MATCEMIB (Mechanical, Acoustic, Thermal, Chemical, Electrical, Magnetic, Intermolecular, Biological) and the Ideal Ultimate Result that have been introduced to students during tutorials, helped them to generated more and broader ideas for their projects.