New tools for the early stages of eco-innovation: an evaluation of simplified TRIZ tools

Eco-innovation is a design approach for reducing the environmental impact of products, processes and services. It aims to decrease the environmental impact of products whilst maximising customer and business value. Integrating design-led environmental approaches at the earliest stages of product development is critical to their effectiveness. This paper reports on a controlled workshop experiment to test a structured method – TRIZ (the theory of inventive problem solving) – for enhancing eco-innovation, particularly in the early stages of team design. The quantitative and qualitative data suggest that TRIZ tools are not best suited to the team design activities at the earliest stages of innovation. The teams’ outputs did include interesting new technology developments. The information provided to designers in early-stage workshops plays a bigger role than expected in innovation.