Improving Self-efficacy in Solving Inventive Problems with TRIZ

The chapter presents the evaluation of Self-Efficacy changes within a sample of students, between the beginning and the end of a course on systematic innovation held at Politecnico di Milano. More specifically, the study aims to show how TRIZ and OTSM-TRIZ (Russian acronyms of, respectively, Theory of Inventive Problem Solving and General Theory of Powerful Thinking) methods and tools, which have been taught within the course on systematic innovation, can improve students’ Self-Efficacy in solving Inventive Problems . The improvement of problem solving skills, or at least a rise in their related Self-efficacy, is considered a crucial aspect for facing challenging and uncomfortable situations. These situations can involve the learning of new concepts and the creative application of knowledge, and the appropriately dealing with unexpected situations. The evaluation has been carried out through a personalized set of sentences to which participants were asked to answer by using a 4-level scale that expressed their degree of agreement or disagreement. The statistical analysis has highlighted that the course and its related content provided a significant contribution towards the overall improvement of the students’ Self-Efficacy. Moreover, a second set of sentences, which aims to assess the attitude towards the main characteristics of creative instruments for problem solving, has shown that students tend to both refuse traditional trade-off solutions and start thinking in a systematic way. This involves the taking into account of aspects and facets that they did not usually consider before the introduction of TRIZ and OTSM-TRIZ concepts.