Peer-reviewed Brainstorming to Facilitate Large Group Collaboration

This paper examines the impact of peer-reviewed brainstorming on the quality of brainstorming ideas. Peer-reviewed brainstorming aims to improve the quality of the brainstorming ideas and reduce the number of noisy comments. A pilot study was conducted that compared traditional, free brainstorming to a peer-reviewed brainstorming process, which requires each idea to be reviewed and edited by peers. The peer-review process did reduce the number of low quality ideas. This process was also rated higher in satisfaction ratings than traditional brainstorming

Creativity and Entrepreneurship - The Role of Creativity Support Systems for Start-ups

Successful start-ups require a number of organizational, efficient and systematic entrepreneurial actions. In addition to the acquisition and the successful use of resources, especially the identification and development of ideas to business models play an important role for the company\u27s success. In this context, creativity exhibits a major importance and creativity support in the phase entrepreneurial activities turn out to be essential. This article discusses the relationship between creativity support, information technology and entrepreneurial activities. With a selective exploratory study, we deepened the understanding of creativity support and information technology on entrepreneurship and especially revealed a lack of the use of creativity support systems, which can aid the development of innovative ideas and lead to beneficial products and services. The compiled results show that the use of creativity techniques and creativity support systems for start-ups is an important component that can fundamentally contribute to the success

Anchored Discussion: Development of a Tool for Creativity in Online Collaboration

Open innovation and crowdsourcing rely on online collaboration tools to enable dispersed people to collaborate on creative ideas. Research shows that creativity in online groups is significantly influenced by the interaction between group members. In this paper, we demonstrate how theory can be effectively used to design and evaluate a tool for creative online collaboration. Specifically, we use the body of knowledge on creativity support systems to inform the development of a tool to support anchored discussions. Anchored discussions represent a new mode for creative interaction. In anchored discussion every comment is tied to some aspect of an idea. We evaluated the anchored discussion tool in a laboratory experiment, which generated insights for additional and refined research. Our results indicate that anchored discussion leads to a more structured discussion amongst group members and consequently to more creative outcomes. In a post session survey, participants made several suggestions on how to improve anchored discussion. This paper concludes that anchored discussion is promising as a new tool to aid online groups in creative collaboration. This paper extends a previous version presented at CRIWG 2015 [Link, 2015]

Creativity, idea generation, improvisational humor, and product design

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 107-116).It is widely recognized that innovation and creativity is the new competitive battleground for product development firms. Engineers and product designers are now expected to be highly creative, prolific idea generators in addition to being analytically competent. Thus, it is of interest to study methods to improve a designer's idea generation capabilities. It is believed that wit, being spontaneous humor production, is strongly related to creativity as both involve making nonobvious connections between seemingly unrelated things. This thesis looks into the realm of humor and improvisational comedy to suggest means of enhancing creative output in blue-sky product design idea generation. We have found that the ability to quickly generate many ideas is strongly correlated (r2=.82) with being able to come up with a single, promising, creative idea. It was also found that, with appropriate training, individuals may learn to become more prolific idea generators. Furthermore, improvisational comedians were more proficient at new product idea generation than professional product designers, and methods for training comedians can be effectively adapted to product design idea generation. In a study where 84 participants (students, professional designers and improvisational comedians) took a cartoon caption humor test and a nominal product brainstorming test, we found that improvisational comedians on average produced 20% more product ideas and 25% more creative product ideas than professional product designers. Furthermore, the few individuals that were highly prolific in both creative product ideation and humorous cartoon caption production had an improvisational comedy background. Many of the games used in improvisational comedy training are intended to promote associative thinking. We designed an improvisational comedy workshop composed of these association-based games. A group of 11 subjects who participated in this workshop increased their idea output on average by 37% in a subsequent product brainstorming session. Our findings suggest that improvisational comedy games are a useful warm-up for idea generation, that prolific generation is not a domain-specific ability and that it is possible to teach creativity. Ultimately, this work can lead to the development of tools and methods that designers can use to improve their idea generation skills.by Barry Matthew Kudrowitz.Ph.D

IT-Gestützte Kollaborative Kreativität

Companies and organizations must constantly evolve in order to stay competitive in the marketplace. An important role is played by innovations that ensure this continuous corporate success. Producing innovations depends strongly on creativity, which is why active support makes sense and is worthwhile. Creativity can be supported by information technology and is most effective in teams and groups. Collaboration and the consideration of different collaboration mechanisms play an equally important role in this context as the active support by information technology. This dissertation deals with the question of how information systems can be designed in order to use information technology to actively support creativity and that collaborative creativity processes are promoted. With the help of a systematic literature review, current creativity support systems were examined and the necessity of research was explained. A design-oriented approach was then used to develop and evaluate various approaches that address the research question. A total of 25 scientific articles were produced, five of which are included in this dissertation. Various conducted studies show the additional value of active support through information technology and provide design guidelines for better support of collaborative creativity.Unternehmen und Organisationen müssen sich ständig weiterentwickeln, um am Markt beständig zu sein und geschäftsfähig zu bleiben. Eine wichtige Rolle sind Innovationen, die diesen kontinuierlichen Unternehmenserfolg sicherstellen. Innovationen zu produzieren hängt stark von Kreativität ab, weshalb eine aktive Unterstützung sinnvoll und lohnenswert ist. Kreativität kann dabei durch Informationstechnik unterstützt werden und entfaltet vor allem in Teams und Gruppen ihre größte Wirkung. Kollaboration und die Betrachtung unterschiedlicher Kollaborationsmechanismen spielt in diesem Kontext gleichermaßen eine wichtige Rolle, wie die aktive Unterstützung durch Informatikstechnik. Die vorliegende Dissertation beschäftigt sich mit der Fragestellung, wie Informationssysteme gestaltet werden können, um einerseits Informationstechnik so einzusetzen, dass sie aktiv Kreativität unterstützt, andererseits so gestaltet werden sollte, dass kollaborative Kreativitätsprozesse gefördert werden. Mit Hilfe einer systematischen Literaturanalyse wurden dabei aktuelle Kreativitätsunterstützungsysteme untersucht und die Notwendigkeit der Forschung dargelegt. Mit einem gestaltungsorientierten Vorgehen wurden daraufhin unterschiedliche Ansätze entwickelt und evaluiert, die die Fragestellung adressieren. Dabei sind insgesamt 25 wissenschaftliche Artikel entstanden, von welchen fünf in diese Dissertation eingebunden sind. Unterschiedliche durchgeführte Studien zeigen daraufhin den Mehrwert von aktiver Unterstützung durch Informationstechnik auf und geben Gestaltungsrichtlinien zur besseren Unterstützung von kollaborativer Kreativität