User roles in asynchronous distributed collaborative idea generation

This paper presents the findings of an exploratory study within a real-life context that investigates participant behaviour and emergent user roles in asynchronous distributed collaborative idea generation by a defined community of users. In the study, a high-fidelity prototype of an online virtual ideas room was built and used by a Community of Interest consisting of representatives from 10 different voluntary organisations spread across Denmark. The study revealed five user roles, which the authors propose that future asynchronous distributed collaborative idea generation platforms should consider

Building creative confidence in idea management processes to improve idea generation in new product development teams

This is a scoping paper that aims to establish effective practices and key players in the domain of Idea Management. The paper defines Idea Management as the generation, evaluation and selection of ideas. The purpose of the paper is to map the current landscape of methodologies and tools in order to identify gaps and support the development of a framework to enhance creative confidence in idea management. The study has two key research questions: (i) what factors are influencing current idea generation practices and (ii) what tools and approaches exist for idea generation. This will help identify how creative confidence can influence the idea generation processes. Creative confidence is the capability to come up with breakthrough ideas, associated with the bravery to perform. If stimulated in the right way with a valuable framework, its impact on employees’ performance is significant in improving team members’ innovation performance and quality of ideas

Designing “Game Idea Generation” Games

This paper introduces brainstorming games developed for the use of game designers. Three games designed especially for generating new game ideas were developed in the GameSpace project, which studies methods for design and evaluation of casual mobile multiplayer games. GameSpace idea generation games have been developed through an iterative process in collaboration with the end users: game industry professionals. According to our workshop experiences and tentative results from a pilot study, idea generation games can be successful devices for the creative work of game designers. Game- based idea generation techniques provide an easily facilitated, focused yet playful setting for coming up with new ideas. However, our experiences indicate that idea generation games feature special challenges that must be taken into consideration when designing such games

Overcoming Design Fixation in Idea Generation

Ideally, designers move past existing ideas to create novel designs. But designers often experience “fixation,” where new ideas are similar to existing designs. An example concept in a brief, or early attachment to one’s initial ideas, can limit the range of designs considered. This research study explored the use of “Design Heuristics,” to overcome fixation in a design education setting. Design Heuristics are a set of prompts intended to point designers toward different types of concepts. The 77 prompts are derived from empirical studies of designers, and have been shown to be effective in developing design capability. In the study, novice engineering design students first used brainstorming, and continued to generate more ideas using Design Heuristics . The results showed that ideas created during brainstorming were more similar to initial ideas. Concepts created with Design Heuristics were judged less similar and more creative. This suggests fixation on initial examples can be mitigated by using tools like Design Heuristics during design, which contributes to how educators can help students develop ideation skills

Evidence-based design heuristics for idea generation

How do product designers create multiple concepts to consider? To address this question, we combine evidence from four empirical studies of design process and outcomes, including award-winning products, multiple concepts for a project by an experienced industrial designer, and concept sets from 48 industrial and engineering designers for a single design problem. This compilation of over 3450 design process outcomes is analyzed to extract concept variations evident across design problems and solutions. The resulting set of patterns, in the form of 77 Design Heuristics, catalog how designers appear to introduce intentional variation into conceptual product designs. These heuristics provide ‘cognitive shortcuts’ that can help designers generate more, and more varied, candidate concepts to consider in the early phases of design

An Agent-based Simulation of the Effectiveness of Creative Leadership\ud

This paper investigates the effectiveness of creative versus\ud uncreative leadership using EVOC, an agent-based model of\ud cultural evolution. Each iteration, each agent in the artificial society invents a new action, or imitates a neighbor’s action. Only the leader’s actions can be imitated by all other agents, referred to as followers. Two measures of creativity were used: (1) invention-to-imitation ratio, iLeader, which measures how often an agent invents, and (2) rate of conceptual change, cLeader, which measures how creative an invention is. High iLeader increased mean fitness of ideas, but only when creativity of followers was low. High iLeader was associated with greater diversity of ideas in the early stage of idea generation only. High Leader increased mean fitness of ideas in the early stage of idea generation; in the later stage it decreased idea fitness. Reasons for these findings and tentative implications for creative leadership in human society are discussed

Idea Generation Decision Tools: A Comparative Study

A sample of 171 college students was selected, with each participant randomly assigned to one of three treatments. Groups of 3 to 5 students were formed. Each group, using group support system (GSS) software, creativity support system (CSS) software, or no computer software (NCS) support, was asked to propose an innovative information system idea. Participants then rated the method used for idea generation on four measures: usefulness, difficulty, enjoyment, and overall satisfaction. The results indicated that using GSS software is viewed by users as being more useful, less difficult, more enjoyable, and more satisfying overall for idea generation than not using computers at all. Moreover, GSS software resulted in better ratings than CSS software on three of the above measures — usefulness, difficulty, and overall satisfaction, and the two methods were statistically equivalent with regard to enjoyment. The practical managerial implication of this study is that GSS is the support tool of choice for idea generation

Exploring the links between idea generation and motivation

The adoption of specific idea management programs is becoming a strategic asset for organizations as they are increasingly trying to adopt specific organizational solutions to detect, fertilize, evaluate and promote new idea generation within and across their boundaries. The centrality of ideas generation is linked to its vital characteristic of being the main source for new products, services, processes, and drivers of change. This papers deals with the controversial role of general organizational setting and closely focuses on the rewards mechanisms that can further nurture creativity. We submit that understanding of the motivational drivers as well as acknowledging the importance of the organizational settings for individual learning behavior and idea generation is crucial in order to distill the links between idea generation and incentive structures. Consistently, we will conduct a theoretical understanding of the phenomenon in order to explain how new ideas can be nurtured through the adoption of a routine system aligned with general human resource management policy