Inventive Engineering: Knowledge and Skills for Creative Engineers by Tomasz Arciszewski

Author:Tomasz Arciszewski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CRC Press/Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
Published: 2015-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

These three stages may be described in casual language as “Preparations,” “Production,” and “Selection.” There are described with some level of detail below.

The first stage, “Fact finding,” may be described as a three-step process, including

Picking out

Pointing up

Preparation

As Osborn presented it, picking out may be understood as opportunity seeking in a given domain, looking for problems waiting for solutions and using your knowledge and curiosity in order to find actual problems, which have not been discovered yet by the other people but that constitute problems whose solutions may lead to new products. It is a very modern understanding of problem solving from the entrepreneurial perspective, which only recently became widely accepted as a part of innovation engineering. Today, we teach students how to look for opportunities, but nearly 70 years ago, including opportunity seeking as a part of problem solving was a major advancement in our thinking about problem solving.

Pointing up is formulating a problem. Osborn considered this step to be critically important for the final results and underlined his belief with Einstein’s classical theory, saying that

The formulation of a problem is far more often essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. (Osborn 1953)

Preparation may be understood as two fold. First, it is knowledge acquisition about the problem and the preparation of key facts for the session’s participants. Second, it is the preparation of the participants and of the physical environment where the session will take place.

“Idea finding” is the second stage in the creative problem-solving stage. Within this stage, the ideas are produced and developed. First comes the production of ideas, and during this step the initial ideas or parts of ideas are produced. This is the most important and difficult part of brainstorming. When the products of this step become available, they become “input” to the next stage, called the development of ideas. During this step, the initial ideas are developed, that is, refined, changed, combined, simplified, or expanded; and a class of ideas emerges.

Solution finding is the last third stage in the process. The previous stage usually results in a large number of ideas, which have been developed without any concern about their quality and feasibility. During this previous stage, judgment was delayed, and this is the key aspect of brainstorming. Now, in the third stage, the judgment finally comes. It is time to use engineering, or quantitative means, to verify the feasibility of the produced ideas and to determine their novelty. Obviously, only a few ideas survive this stage, and they become the final products of brainstorming.

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