Development of Universal Research Advising for Engineering Discipline

Recent rapid development of information technology has enabled everyone to instantaneously access to information all around the world, which is rapidly lowering the value of advanced knowledge owned by university faculties. Instantaneous access to a large amount of information sometimes confuses both students and their supervisors when interactively proceeding with research activities. As a countermeasure against this situation, the authors are challenging to develop Universal Research Advising (URA), a universal research support methodology shared across all engineering disciplines, by applying Value Engineering (VE) and Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ). This paper aims to introduce the concept of URA followed by discussion on its practical applications and future prospects.