Frequently Asked Questions about the ASIT creativity method

ASIT is less publicized than brainstorming for a simple reason: SolidCreativity, the trademark holder, requires that only trained practitioners facilitate ASIT workshops. Unlike brainstorming, which anyone can organize (often with disappointing results), ASIT maintains a high level of quality through this requirement.

This approach prioritizes effectiveness over notoriety. Companies that use ASIT (Airbus, Michelin, ArcelorMittal) achieve concrete results: 12 patents in one year, +35% turnover in 3 months for an SME.

You too can benefit from this proven method by taking a training course or by calling upon a certified facilitator.

Brainstorming generates ideas "randomly" based on momentary inspiration, which often leads to predictable and barely innovative results. ASIT systematically scans all possibilities by manipulating the problem's constraints.

Result: in 3 hours, ASIT produces dozens of surprising and applicable ideas, whereas brainstorming remains stuck on solutions everyone already knows.

For a detailed comparison, see our ASIT vs Brainstorming page.

No. Our comparative analysis shows that AI and brainstorming fail to deliver on their innovation promises. AI excels at optimizing the existing but fails to generate disruptive innovations because it is based on known patterns.

ASIT systematically manipulates constraints and explores all possibilities, including counter-intuitive solutions that an AI would never propose. Example: using the problem itself as the solution (police barrier stabilized by the protesters).

Check out our LinkedIn article comparing AI, brainstorming and ASIT (opens in a new tab) for a detailed analysis with our data from hundreds of workshops since 2002.

Yes, in the sense that ASIT systematically generates dozens of innovative ideas by scanning all possibilities, whereas brainstorming remains stuck on known solutions.

Our client testimonials confirm this:

• Airbus: "Best training ever had!"
• Thales: "Effective and simple solutions"
• ArcelorMittal: innovative solutions generated in 3 months

Furthermore, SolidCreativity offers a unique guarantee: if after your training you encounter a difficulty during an ASIT workshop, we intervene to solve the problem together - for life. No other creativity method offers this commitment.

Absolutely! ASIT values and fosters usage-disruptive innovations.

A usage disruption allows discovering new markets with relatively small changes to already mastered means and while respecting constraints. ASIT clients are satisfied with the results: see user feedback (opens in a new tab).

ASIT is not, unlike quality era tools (Pareto, Ishikawa...) and all brainstorming sessions, searching for a root cause to correct. ASIT will manipulate objects with its tools to propose solutions (or evolutions).

Moreover, often the search for the cause has already been done, before moving to ASIT, and no satisfactory solution has been found.

ASIT goes further to find innovative solutions, sometimes by using what was considered the source of the problem or by removing an aspect thought to be important from the problematic situation.

As with ASIT, creativity is stimulated by the use of words, these words can represent all sorts of things:
We can manipulate small or large objects (a vehicle, freight, the wheel) or even very small ones (polymer chains, sulfur bonds and carbon mass...) which will for example allow inventing new materials.

Example of abstract and manipulable objects with ASIT: support, asset, impact, reaction, duration, emanation, oxidation, or also: customer relationship, company organization, purchasing act, feeling, process step...

Our books and e-learning modules allow for an initiation to discover the power of ASIT, but training significantly accelerates your skills development.

The difference: in 2 days of training, you practice ASIT on YOUR concrete cases, with an expert trainer who corrects your mistakes in real time. You become autonomous immediately, whereas self-learning requires months of trial and error.

Think of it like learning to drive: the highway code (the book) does not replace the accompanied driving hours (the training). To be effective quickly and avoid costly mistakes, training is the most profitable investment.

Brainstorming is indeed free... but what is its real cost? Hours of meetings to generate predictable ideas that everyone already has, without real disruptive innovation.

ASIT trains you in 2 days on a systematic method that generates dozens of innovative ideas in 3 hours. Once trained, your teams can facilitate their own internal ASIT workshops - it then becomes free AND effective.

Furthermore, our "lifetime" guarantee ensures support if you encounter a difficulty after the training. The ROI is clear: a single concretized innovation largely pays for the training, rather than risking project failure for lack of a structured method.

With an ASIT creativity session you will find a range of innovative solutions for, for example:

• Innovatively solving an old or blocking problem (product, service, process or organization)
• Finding alternative solutions rather than correcting and complexifying a historical solution
• In technology: Bypassing a patent by finding a new solution
• Anticipating possible future competing solutions and protecting against them
• Generating, evaluating and daring to propose a differentiating response in a call for tenders
• Finding creative conceptual solutions and then materializing them into market innovations

We have never found an impossible topic to address (technology, process, service…) but some have more innovation potential than others.

ASIT is a very high-performance method for innovation challenges. If the domain experts (with their knowledge and root cause search) are blocked or if the implemented solutions are increasingly complex without ever really suiting, then ASIT will make the difference.

Two points to check to assess if ASIT will make the difference:

• The topic has been addressed by a company for a long time, without finding a satisfactory solution.
• There is an aggravating factor (a parameter where the more there is, the more the problem exists). For example: "the more customers there are, the more the process is clogged".

ASIT is used by many professionals for equally professional results. You can use the method in the context of your activity but the use of the trademarks "ASIT" and "Advanced Systematic Inventive Thinking" is subject to the agreement of its owner: the company SolidCreativity. Be careful not to use these trademarks (website or book for example) without this agreement.

It is indeed an initiation dating from 2004, it allowed you to see creativity differently and glimpse the power of the method despite its simplicity. Careful rereading of the book and progression by trial and error can help you improve. Real training can bring you more quickly and easily to an effective autonomous user level.

Since the release of the book and pack in 2004, ASIT has evolved enormously to gain in systematicity and effectiveness. ASIT is still evolving through successive touches (a few papers are starting to come out on it) and the variants ASIT-BIM, ecoASIT and FASiT also show notable evolutions but for targeted uses.

Many consider the electric light bulb to be a technological disruptive innovation because they consider the distance between the candle and the bulb. Looking from another point of view, we can follow a slow progressive improvement of the electric wire which, one day, allows lighting after having been protected by a glass bulb (which had its own slow evolution). We therefore note that the bulb is not a technological disruption (rather a slow evolution even) but a real usage disruption: we do something else with electricity, thanks to the bulb.
From this observation, and others, we see that all existing things (goods or services) come from one of these 3 things:

• The discovery and mastery of an existing physical phenomenon (electricity, radioactivity, heat, friction, gravity, rolling, vaccine, magnetism, barter...)
• The improvement of an existing (new version, optimization, slight error...): this forms evolution trees; imagine for example a family tree with all the cars.
• A usage disruption by the crossing of several improvement trees (tree of the electric wire and the glass bulb that crosses the tree of lighting in the context of the invention of the electric light bulb).
  It may only be a matter of language and point of view but we prefer to track disruptive innovations because we are certain they exist and know how to provoke them.