An Approach to Identify the Readiness Level of a Solution Concept in the Inventive Design Method

Abstract It is generally known that the ranking of ideas during creative sessions creates two majors problems. The first is to undervalue a promising idea and thus wash away business priorities. The second is to overstate a false good idea that will be the underlying cause of unnecessary expenses. Although the subject of ranking ideas is spread and common in studies and research, it still poses an obvious contradiction: the level of definition of an idea must be precise to secure investments and imprecise to preserve its innovative role. In our research on this topic, we endeavored to highlight a new path that would both simplify engineers access to formal calculation (such as to give credibility to an idea by removing the blur surrounding it) while preserving potential inventive margins by identifying for each concept its degree of feasibility. However, this second part was not clearly defined in our research. In this paper, we present a complementary aspect of our approach. Its underlying idea is to associate each index to a TRL (Technical Readiness Level) that is likely to assess in an objective and formal way its maturity with a recognized scale in industrial environments. A case study and a discussion of the results of the contribution will be discussed at the end of the paper.