The engineers’ dream: formulas and templates to tame the wild mysteries of creativity and turn it into a systematic, repeatable process. Advocates of mechanical approaches to creativity and innovation have applied them primarily, but not exclusively, to product innovation. Mechanical innovation or “systematic inventive thinking” replaces unstructured brainstorming with a structured and disciplined approach to conceive products that differ enough from existing products to be interesting, yet are practical to make and market.

This “inside the box” approach begins with the characteristics of your existing products and encourages you to listen to the voice of the product, not that of the customer. Genrich Altshuller’s TRIZ matrix exemplifies mechanical innovation, but related recombinant approaches include iterated experimentation through computer modeling, simulation, and prototyping (“hyperinnovation”), combinatorial and high-throughput testing, data-driven discovery, the Matrix of Change—a tool for business process reengineering, and genetic or evolutionary algorithms.

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