The paper illustrates an original model and a dialogue-based software application that have been developed by integrating the logic of ARIZ with some OTSM-TRIZ models, in order to guide a user, also with no TRIZ background, to the analysis of inventive problems. The dialogue-based procedure brings to the construction of a model of the inventive problem, which is used both to trigger new solutions by highlighting different solving perspectives and to start an automatic knowledge search within technical and scientific information. The prototype system has been tested with students at Politecnico di Milano and at the University of Florence. The paper details the structure of the algorithm and the results of the first validation activity.