**3. Argument**

Starting with creative teams established in the 1970s in France, nowadays is more and more obvious that lonely thinkers who produce relevant contributions to science and technology, even if extremely talented, are *rara avis*. Plethora of information and the complexity of technological, time and social constraints require effective groups of specialists with various points of views. For obvious reasons, young people are preferred as sources of ideas and creative specialists and attracted in research projects at various levels. As a consequence,

nurturing creativity is a crucial task for education at all levels. In polytechnic higher education the challenge is to adapt the syllabi and curriculum as a holistic approach to the real-world problem solving. Creative student groups are one of the solutions closest to the day-by-day engineering challenges.

Even though student creative teams are not easy to establish and sustain, they follow the same group rules as enterprise or any real-world research teams and can provide the precious output of experience and innovation: small groups of people linked by trust thrive on the associative functioning. This concept is underused in Romanian polytechnic universities, which suffer from scarce financing, lack of efficient policies regarding the research quality management and are rather rigid regarding the new pedagogy behind a learning context where temporary "chaos" of questioning and doubting is encouraged and evaluation rules change. Naturally, one might imagine the extent of the outcome of more flexible education methods, where personal experience is mostly considered and personal point of view encouraged. It is characteristic for technical and applied sciences domains the validation and augmentation of one's personal point of view in a group or peers. Student groups are one of the closest approaches to the real world of engineering, but still, they are far from being used in teaching and examination due to the ill-functioning bridging with the so-called objective evaluation. On-going standardised testing is restraining the ability to see and present reality from different angles. Even so, each and every one reports learning and education, in general, as a person‐ alised experience, the resulting knowledge being always the integration of the "standard academic package" in own frame of beliefs and practical experience.

Technological innovation is strongly connected with creative approach to practical problems. The methods to nurture technological creativity were described by G.S. Altschuller in the socalled Theory of the Solution of Inventive Problems (original TRIZ) with the related Algorithm of Solution of Inventive Problems (original ARIZ) [6], but the steps approached there do not fully apply for students groups enrolled in a creative quest. The students in creative groups need to learn to organise their work and the methods of research in technology and engineer‐ ing. Also, the motivations are different and instable and conduct to absenteeism or discour‐ aging attitudes and drop-out. The leaking pipe phenomenon depletes the initial enthusiastic groups of students of those who lack proper motivation, despite their aptitudes for investiga‐ tion and knowledge.

This paper is the result of a research aiming to find the triggers for creative thinking in groups of engineering students. This study came as a need to identify ways to stimulate students to succeed during preparation of their final exams and thesis, enhancing their ability to produce original work. In fact, as Sir Ken Robinson emphasised, "…everyone has huge creative capacities as a natural result of being a human being. The challenge is to develop them. A culture of creativity has to involve everybody not just a select few" [7].
