TRIZ, the Soviet-initiated Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, is gaining acknowledgement both as a systematic methodology for innovation and a powerful tool for technology forecasting. Nevertheless, the analysis of patents necessary for gathering the data to be used for the previsional activity is very cumbersome and sometimes unworthy due to the intrinsic low reliability of forecasting tasks. With this perspective it is necessary to speed up the identification of the technical/physical conflict(s) overcome by an invention, according to its textual description. Although text-mining tools have reached relevant capabilities for extracting useful information from huge sets of documents, no specific means are available to support the analysis of patents with the aim of identifying the contradiction underlying a given technical system. This paper proposes a computer-aided approach for accomplishing such a task: the algorithm is described and validated by means of practical examples.

This paper proposes a set of Eco-guidelines for supporting designers in developing new greener products and processes. The first requirement that a guideline should have is to be sufficiently general to cover every kind of problem and at the same time sufficiently specific to bring the user closer to the solution without requiring too much personal inspiration. This balance was searched by adopting one of the most known systematic innovation techniques: TRIZ (Russian acronym of Theory of Inventive Problem Solving). In the literature, there are many examples of integrations between Eco-guidelines and problem-solving methods, but the solutions that are suggested, however effective, are not necessarily eco-friendly. To overcome this problem, the authors propose a rigorous ontology indicating how to apply a specific problem-solving strategy onto a specific part of the problem, trying to make the user aware of the environmental consequences of his design changes. The result of this work is a set of 59 guidelines. The article explains the birth of each guideline, the way in which they were adapted with respect to the known technique, and the motivation for which they should generate greener solutions, in light of the results of an experiment involving engineering students in real industrial cases.

Sustainability is one of the most recent theme designers have to deal with and sustainability parameters are quickly gaining the top of the list of the requirements any product has to fulfil. Due to standards, legal regulation and customer growing awareness of environmental issues, engineers cannot avoid turning their everyday activities from design to eco-design. By the way, a significant drop of environmental impact of products cannot be achieved by simply adding a „green‟ constraint to the already overpopulated list of design constraints. To answer to this issue a plurality of methods are available helping the designer (or pretending to) to assess product lifecycle or to provide suggestions on how to innovate the product or process according to sustainable goals. Within this context, the present work describes a way of using TRIZ concepts and tools in order to both assess and innovate a technical system so that some practical activities to ensure sustainable results can be easily embodied into everyday design practice. The main novelty on the operative level consists of an original method based on a set of Guidelines derived from Laws of Technical System Evolution (LTSE) in order to assess the value of existing solution (e.g. using Resources and Functionality as a metric of evaluation), to understand the most promising directions of improvement and to improve said solution also according to sustainability requirements. The paper will show the way Guidelines are applied with practical examples and an industrial case study will be presented and discussed.