Innovation situation questionnaire

Knowledge is the key to inventive designing. It should be acquired in a systematic way and should be at least sufficient for the inventive problem considered. Working on the innovation situation questionnaire (ISQ) is a relatively simple way to acquire knowledge in a format that makes it easier to comprehend the acquired knowledge and to understand a given designing situation. 

The entire process is time consuming and may require at least a day or more of work. In the case of difficult inventive problems, the process may take up to a week. However, it is not a waste of time the inventive engineer learns about the designing problem and in the process structures the acquired knowledge. In this case, more means more the more is learned about the designing problem, the better chance there is of producing novel results. The ISQ process has three main stages  

Individual stages are discussed with key heuristics intended to make the process more effective and easier to conduct for an inexperienced inventive engineer. There is one general heuristic to follow during the entire process  

Use a casual language and avoid using any specific technical terms which might imply any specific solutions. 

The process will be explained using as an example the design of a floor structural system in an industrial building. 

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The following procedure is mostly based on classical TRIZ, as Altshuller developed it. However, it has been modified by the Author. Also, for the benefit of readers, the use of the innovation situation questionnaire (ISQ) has been incorporated into the first stage of the procedure (problem identification), although ISQ was developed much later than Altshuller s original TRIZ. (The ISQ was developed at the Kishinev School of TRIZ in Moldavia in the late 1980s, about 40 years after the initial ideas of TRIZ were formulated.)... 

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