Abstract:

In this paper experiences about the implementation of creative activities in industrial engineering degrees are related. These activities were used in engineering courses to improve the creative skills of the students. Thus, the main goal was to make them capable to design innovative products using ideation methods and working in groups. Although there are some works in the literature about the implementation of creative methods in engineering degrees none of them have established well defined approaches which are able to assess the creativity and innovation level of products in an effective way. Indeed, one of the main problems that have been found by instructors during the classes is how students can evaluate their own creative solutions and the degree of innovation of the designed products. There are no many works in the literature focusing in this topic and all of them have been developed to be applied by engineers with long experience in design. These methods measure the innovation of products by the quantification of a number of factors. However, these factors present some difficulties for students who are not used to work with them. In fact, one of the main problems found by instructors in implementing creativity procedures at university level is that students do not have enough experience about the assessment of engineering products and their degree of innovation.

This paper describes a new procedure for the measurement of the level of creativity that new ideas provide. It can be also used for the measurement of the innovation of products. A case study is presented to illustrate the method and evaluate its effectiveness. In this activity an engineering design problem is proposed to the students and they have to find the best solution. Brainstorming is used as idea generation method and they have to measure their creativity using the proposed approach. The main advantage of the method is that it can be easily used by students and instructors. In this way the students can evaluate their own ideas in order to sort them and select the most creative ones. The method works with a three dimensional scale which are level, scope and goals. The comparison of the proposed method with other existing approaches allows highlighting the easier understanding of the factors to be evaluated.

Keywords:

Assessing creativity, Engineering Innovation, Design activities, Usefulness of products.