Creativity—a Bottleneck in Engineering Design?

Creativity is one of the important research topics in engineering design, industrial design, psychology and other domains. Researchers are looking for possibilities to improve the creativity of individuals or teams based on methods, tools, specific environment or mindset. On the other hand, it is well known that in industry just a very small percentage of ideas available are leading to successful products. Why should we generate even more ideas, as long as the success rate is that poor? Design Thinking claimed to address this topic; SCRUM and similar concepts of agile development did this in a different way. Are these just simple trial and error methods? Is the classical design methodology becoming obsolete? Combining all the valuable methods and concepts including LEAN lead us to the TMS- approach developed at TUM. Interdisciplinarity, lean, agile, design methodology, and customer orientation are important aspects. A framework of methods and working principles are supporting this attempt. More than 300 master-students of different disciplines and more than 250 practitioners in industry worked in small interdisciplinary teams following this TMS- approach. More than 15% of the students continued and developed a start-up quite successfully. In industry the output and the comments of participants convinced their top-management. What is the origin of this success? Just making things work and tangible in early phases of product development! Then the designers as well as the management have a much better chance to recognise the potential of ideas! This was observed and recognised during all the projects. Conclusion out of this: research regarding creativity is valuable and necessary. More important in industry—and for students—is the “making” of ideas to reduce or eliminate inadequate barriers.