Teaching TRIZ at university: a longitudinal study

This paper discusses the outcomes of the course on Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ unit) delivered at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) over the last five years. It analyses the results of numerous surveys on students' problem skills and compares the impact of the TRIZ unit with the impact of a typical engineering unit on students' problem solving abilities. The results presented in this paper suggest that the enrichment approach is superior to the infusion approach for teaching engineering problem solving. The TRIZ unit was also found to enhance students' problem solving self-efficacy significantly more than the four years of an engineering degree. It is concluded, that the most likely reasons for a success of the TRIZ unit can be explained based on the information-processing theories of problem solving: it explicitly teaches tools for problem representation as well as formal problem solving heuristics.