Chemical Engineering and Processing 45 (2006) 507–514 Application of the TRIZ creativity enhancement approach to design of inherently safer chemical processes Rajagopalan Srinivasan a , Andrzej Kraslawski b,* a Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, National University of Singapore, 10 Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore 119260, Singapore b Lappeenranta University of Technology, Lappeenranta, Finland Received 6 September 2004; received in revised form 1 October 2005; accepted 3 November 2005 Available online 6 January 2006 Abstract The paper gives a brief overview of the creativity supporting methods of potential interest to process engineering community. Information about computer implementations of the presented methods is introduced as well. Creative problem solving can be broadly classified into intuitive and analytical methods—the paper suggests the analytical approaches to creative problem solving as the most promising group for process engineers. Special attention is given to TRIZ, a popular method for systematic creativity. Classical TRIZ needs to be modified in order to be used in a specialised domain such as process engineering. We discuss the changes needed and illustrate the application of the modified TRIZ to the design of inherently safer chemical processes. A discussion of the advantages and drawback of creativity enhancing methods in the context of process engineering is also presented along with directions for future development. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: TRIZ; Creativity; Innovation 1. Introduction During the last few years, several trends can be observed in the processing industries: lowering of profit margins on commodities, growing importance of sustainability considera- tions and the environmental aspects of production, high costs of R&D, significance of low-tonnage, high value-added prod- ucts as well as customer-oriented products, compression of the time from development-to-market, and shortening of product life-cycles. These factors motivate process engineers towards increasing product and process innovation. Usually innovative- ness is understood as the result of creativity of individuals and the management process inside of an organisation. Traditionally neither aspect of innovation has been of specific interest to pro- cess engineers. For example, in Elsevier’s ScienceDirect journal articles database, as of 2004, there are around 8000 articles deal- ing with creativity, however, only around 150 papers, cite this word in the chemical and process engineering literature in the last 10 years. This reflects the weak interest of the chemical and * Corresponding author. Tel.: +358 5 621 2139; fax: +358 40 591 3379. E-mail address: Andrzej.Kraslawski@lut.fi (A. Kraslawski). process engineering community in research on creativity. In this article, we review the literature on creativity that is relevant to the community and using a case study of inherently safer process design, show how some of these ideas can be fruitfully applied. One of the difficulties in the practical study of creativity arises from its imprecise notion and the widespread belief that it is the domain of psychology, philosophy or sociology. There are hun- dreds of definitions of creativity [1]. For the sake of simplicity, in this paper, we use the following working definition that is convenient for engineering applications: “creativity is a cogni- tive process leading to the generation of the solutions (products, processes, services, behaviours, etc.) which are new, unexpected, and useful.” Research on creativity usually concentrates on five main aspects: 1. The essence of the notion: How is it defined and to what are the different types? 2. Its assessment: How to measure creativity? 3. The process: How to get a creative idea? 4. The person: What are the features of creative people? and 5. The product: What are the attributes of a creative product)? 6. An excellent review of the different aspects of creativity from the “soft” sciences point-of-view is given by Sternberg [1]. 0255-2701/$ – see front matter © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cep.2005.11.009