1 On the Efficiency of Teaching TRIZ: Experiences in a French Engineering School Denis Cavallucci Associate Professor at INSA Graduate School of Science and Technology of Strasbourg. LGECO, Design Engineering Laboratory, 24, Boulevard de la Victoire, 67084 Strasbourg Cedex, France. E-mail: denis.cavallucci@insa-strasbourg.fr David Oget Associate Professor at INSA Graduate School of Science and Technology of Strasbourg. LGECO, Design Engineering Laboratory, 24, Boulevard de la Victoire, 67084 Strasbourg Cedex, France. E-mail: david.oget@insa-strasbourg.fr Our industry is currently undergoing a transformation that is guiding it from the quality era to that of innovation. This transformation necessarily involves changing design practices, the foundations of which currently rest on an optimization mentality. An innovation oriented approach would require that the bases of the design action contain other rules of invention where creativity and problem solving would have priority. In order to address these requirements, some teaching institutions have initially resorted to teaching creativity methods by simply stimulating the ideation phases of standard design processes. Having reached the limit of what creativity methods could contribute, TRIZ appears as a likely alternative to such methods by providing greater structure and more results. However, the first experiments in teaching TRIZ rapidly revealed an incompatibility between the time needed for effectively using it and the time generally allotted for teaching a new method. This article presents the results of an experiment in introducing a TRIZ software version and the way in which it was implemented in engineering students' coursework at INSA-Strasbourg over the past three years. These results lead us to state that the use of software improves quality in the TRIZ teaching process, especially with regard to the number of skills dealt with and acquired by engineering students in project situations. Keywords: Inventive design, TRIZ, innovation, teaching skills 1. Introduction: Professional and Educational Background Greater international economic competition bearing on industry has given rise to a specific requirement in the educational systems part of the labor market: acquiring inter-disciplinary skills that can be mobilized for use in professional situations [1]. The types of expertise sought include skills in communications, leadership, creativity and innovation [2]. What can engineering schools in France do to focus on this demand? An analysis of the situation makes it plain that research and training in higher education should take into account and implement counterfactual reasoning and design [3]. Advanced professional training should concentrate on creativity and target people with high inventive potential in order to develop the creative, inventive and entrepreneurial capacities of a nation. Academics in French Grande écoles and the practice of benchmarking exclusively scholastic excellence hinder the implementation of university level design training programs that are based on creativity and inventiveness. Didactic and pedagogic situations in French higher learning engage in training programs that are minimally transferable, overly theoretical and disciplinary, inadequately focused on developing capabilities for dealing with complex or vague issues, which use critical thinking and analysis of contradictory perspectives [4]. In contrast, learning inventiveness in an engineering school can never be exclusively theoretical, mono-disciplinary and non- transferable. An essential question emerges from these reflections: How should the pedagogic organization for learning inventiveness be structured? Two teaching methods currently co-exist. The first, which is predominant in France, focuses on deductive reasoning and is based on a transference approach in education [5]. Lecture courses are given intended to