Advanced Innovation Design Approach - AIDA

Between 1998 and 2015 TriS Europe performed its observation and analysis in more than 600 industrial companies in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and other European countries which can be summarized as follows. About 60 to 70 percent of all initiatives pursued by the European companies to integrate TRIZ methodology into their innovation process were initially "frozen" or abandoned. Of those initiatives that did succeed, most ended up creating products that delivered sustainable or incremental improvements while less than 10% resulted in breakthrough solutions. As a consequence the innovation potential of TRIZ still remained undervalued within companies.

Our experience confirms that TRIZ delivers more breakthroughs for less cost - if the right tools are applied at the right time and place. Thus the idea of the Adavanced Innovation Design Approach hes been born. After analysing numerous industrial projects, we have discovered the factors that lead to low innovation process yields and developed recommendations for optimising of best practice innovation tools.

Advanced Innovation Design Approach (AIDA) is a holistic approach for enhancing innovative and competitive capability of industrial companies. The name Advanced Innovation Design Approach (AIDA) was proposed in the research project "Innovation Process 4.0" run at the University of Applied Sciences Offenburg, Germany in co-operation with 10 German industrial companies in 2015–2019. AIDA can be considered as a pioneering mindset, an individually adaptable range of strongest innovation techniques and advanced innovation methods, best tools and methods of the theory of inventive problem solving TRIZ,organisational measures for accelerating innovation, IT-solutions for Computer-Aided Innovation, and other tools for new product development, elaborated in the recent decade in the industry and academia.

The Advanced Innovation Design Approach has been refined and further developed for the application in the field of process engineering in the context of the European research project "Intensified by Design - Platform for the intensification of processes involving solids handling” within international consortium of 22 universities, research institutes and industrial companies under H2020 SPIRE programme. In 2020 the European Commission has placed AIDA on its Innovation Radar as innovation with the high market potential.

Initially the AIDA has been conceptualised as systemic approach including analysis, optimizations and further development of the innovation process and promoting the innovation climate in industrial companies. The innovation process with self-configuration, self-optimization, self-diagnostics and intelligent information processing and communication, is understood as a holistic system comprising following typical phases with feedback loops and simultaneous auxiliary or follow-up processes: uncovering of solution-neutral customer needs, technology and market trends, identification of the needs and problems with high market potential and formulation of the innovation tasks and strategy, systematic idea generation and problem solving, evaluation and enhancement of solution ideas, creation of innovation concepts based on solution ideas, evaluation of the innovation concepts as well as implementattion, validation and market launch of chosen innovation concepts.

AIDA postulates the complete problem analysis and a comprehensive idea generation and problem solving. The problems faced by the industry can not be solved by single eureka idea. The principle of completeness in the new product development can be illustrated by following 4 steps.

1. Initial complex problem must be segmented into the partial problems. The problem ranking method helps to identify problems crucial for innovation success.
2. The strongest TRIZ inventive principles replace the random brainsorming, increasing the quality and quantity of ideas within a short period of time. For each partial problem several ideas must be generated. No relevant idea should be overseen.
3. The complementary solution ideas are combined to the solution concepts. A robust solution concept delivers solutions for all partial problems.
4. The solution concepts often have their secondary side effects, like costs, risks or R&D expenditures, which must be limited through concept optimization.