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

Exploiting supplier capabilities to maximise product design opportunities in the fuzzy front end activities

This paper explores the Fuzzy Front-End (FFE), i.e. the first phase of the Product Design and Development process where a company formulates a product concept to be developed and decides whether or not to invest resources in the further development of an idea. Our goal is to understand how companies leverage supply chain capabilities to improve product design opportunities in order to obtain optimized product concepts in the FFE. From the analysis of our pilot study, the results suggest that FFE is organized differently depending on design requirements and supply chain capabilities and that matching design requirements with supplier capabilities during the FFE improves performance. Therefore, the findings indicate that the proposed Conceptual Framework has the potential to be used by companies to design their FFE and to enhance the use of supply chain capabilities in their product design activities

The danger within: the role of genetic, behavioural and ecological factors in population persistence of colour polymorphic species

Polymorphic species have been the focus of important work in evolutionary biology. It has been suggested that colour polymorphic species have specific evolutionary and population dynamics that enable them to persist through environmental changes better than less variable species. We suggest that recent empirical and theoretical work indicates that polymorphic species may be more vulnerable to extinction than previously thought. This vulnerability arises because these species often have a number of correlated sexual, behavioural, life history and ecological traits, which can have a simple genetic underpinning. When exacerbated by environmental change, these alternate strategies can lead to conflict between morphs at the genomic and population levels, which can directly or indirectly affect population and evolutionary dynamics. In this perspective, we identify a number of ways in which the nature of the correlated traits, their underpinning genetic architecture, and the inevitable interactions between colour morphs can result in a reduction in population fitness. The principles illustrated here apply to all kinds of discrete polymorphism (e.g. behavioural syndromes), but we focus primarily on colour polymorphism because they are well studied. We urge further empirical investigation of the genetic architecture and interactions in polymorphic species to elucidate the impact on population fitness

Improving product design and development performances in SMEs with user centred design activities

The study is framed within the context and knowledge that companies that continually achieve product design and development success, habitually work more closely with customers and users. They do this to discover needs and wants in order that these might be translated into new or improved product or service offerings. It is widely recognised that many companies achieve success by reaching-out to customers and users directly in order to tap into what matters most to the people that will purchase and use their products and services: such engagement enables the development of a healthy pipeline of breakthrough products and services. The importance of connecting with customers and users is not a new phenomenon: building-in the voice of the customer is a critical element of well-established tools such as Quality Functional Deployment (QFD) in large organisations. Awareness of this sparked the simple question, ‘why, with so much support and clear evidence of the benefits of customer- and user-involvement in identifying and fulfilling needs has the practice not become universally embedded within product design and development activities?’ The main aim of this study is to build upon the work of organisations such as the Design Council and NESTA, and authors such as Herstatt and von Hippell, Cooper and Kleinschmidt and Ulrich and Eppinger. These agencies and researchers have indicated - in numerous studies and publications - that direct contact with customers and end-users is one of the best means of generating information about new product ideas. They also assert that ‘experiencing’ the use environment of a particular product or function is a prerequisite for generating high quality information. Many studies provide useful insights into generic best practices and offer evidence to support the assertion that direct contact with customers and end-users is important for large organisations. The research reported below continues in this vein but extends the analysis to examine specifically: (i) the importance (to business success) of fulfilling customer needs, (ii) the extent of customer and user involvement in identifying and fulfilling needs, (iii) the range of activities in which stakeholders and users are typically involved, (iv) the classes of issues discussed in engagement practices, and (v) the issues that contribute to success and failure in product development in SMEs. The study is important in two key respects. First, because even though organisations such as the Design Council and NESTA have highlighted the positive impact that fulfilling user needs can have on business growth, there remains a mismatch between perceived wisdom and practice. Second, from a research perspective, it builds upon existing theory and provides a level of granularity that both extends understanding and provides novel insights with respect to how the gap between theory (known value) and practice (adoption and use) might be bridged. The research was undertaken in three key phases. The first involved a series of scoping and context-setting interviews with respondents in selected, innovating SMEs. The second phase involved the development of a sector-based sample of SMEs and the distribution of a comprehensive qualitative-quantitative survey questionnaire. Following data analysis, a third phase witnessed the validation and nuancing of initial results via further engagement with selected innovating SMEs in the safety, general products, and healthcare sectors. Key findings from the study include the following: users and customers are an excellent source of ideas and intelligence in the product development process, however, many companies fail to exploit customers optimally (or at all) as a development resource; identifying user needs is an integral component in the product design process, but many companies lack the skills and knowledge to undertake this work adequately; where customer/user engagement is witnessed, it is frequently at non-optimal phases in the development process and limited in ambit (or undertaken by functions that are poorly-equipped to reap full benefits); and, whilst theory relating to user-involvement is widely recognised in the SME community, this is rarely translated effectively into cutting-edge practice. The study provides a contribution to new knowledge by focusing on the improvement of front-end product design and development performance via the deployment of user-centred design activities. It unpacks and details the factors that impact on identifying and fulfilling customer needs in front-end product development in UK SME manufacturing companies, and develops a framework that aids in reducing uncertainty and maximising effective practice in the development process. Further, the work maps and analyses state-of-the-art research in the domain and presents an agenda for future investigation designed to stimulate and support improved user-engagement activity and thus improved product development outcomes

Challenges and opportunities for the future of Brain-Computer Interface in neurorehabilitation

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) provide a unique technological solution to circumvent the damaged motor system. For neurorehabilitation, the BCI can be used to translate neural signals associated with movement intentions into tangible feedback for the patient, when they are unable to generate functional movement themselves. Clinical interest in BCI is growing rapidly, as it would facilitate rehabilitation to commence earlier following brain damage and provides options for patients who are unable to partake in traditional physical therapy. However, substantial challenges with existing BCI implementations have prevented its widespread adoption. Recent advances in knowledge and technology provide opportunities to facilitate a change, provided that researchers and clinicians using BCI agree on standardisation of guidelines for protocols and shared efforts to uncover mechanisms. We propose that addressing the speed and effectiveness of learning BCI control are priorities for the field, which may be improved by multimodal or multi-stage approaches harnessing more sensitive neuroimaging technologies in the early learning stages, before transitioning to more practical, mobile implementations. Clarification of the neural mechanisms that give rise to improvement in motor function is an essential next step towards justifying clinical use of BCI. In particular, quantifying the unknown contribution of non-motor mechanisms to motor recovery calls for more stringent control conditions in experimental work. Here we provide a contemporary viewpoint on the factors impeding the scalability of BCI. Further, we provide a future outlook for optimal design of the technology to best exploit its unique potential, and best practices for research and reporting of findings

Artificial Intuition for Automated Decision-Making

Automated decision-making techniques play a crucial role in data science, AI, and general machine learning. However, such techniques need to balance accuracy with computational complexity, as their solution requirements are likely to need exhaustive analysis of the potentially numerous events combinations, which constitute the corresponding scenarios. Intuition is an essential tool in the identification of solutions to problems. More specifically, it can be used to identify, combine and discover knowledge in a “parallel” manner, and therefore more efficiently. As a consequence, the embedding of artificial intuition within data science is likely to provide novel ways to identify and process information. There is extensive research on this topic mainly based on qualitative approaches. However, due to the complexity of this field, limited quantitative models and implementations are available. In this article, the authors have extended the evaluation to include a real-world, multi-disciplinary area in order to provide a more comprehensive assessment. The results demonstrate the value of artificial intuition, when embedded in decision-making and information extraction models and frameworks. In fact, the output produced by the approach discussed in their article was compared with a similar task carried out by a group of experts in the field. This demonstrates comparable results further showing the potential of this framework, as well as artificial intuition as a tool for decision-making and information extraction

A Complete Spectroscopic Survey of the Milky Way satellite Segue 1: Dark matter content, stellar membership and binary properties from a Bayesian analysis

We introduce a comprehensive analysis of multi-epoch stellar line-of-sight velocities to determine the intrinsic velocity dispersion of the ultrafaint satellites of the Milky Way. Our method includes a simultaneous Bayesian analysis of both membership probabilities and the contribution of binary orbital motion to the observed velocity dispersion within a 14-parameter likelihood. We apply our method to the Segue 1 dwarf galaxy and conclude that Segue 1 is a dark-matter-dominated galaxy at high probability with an intrinsic velocity dispersion of 3.7^{+1.4}_{-1.1} km/sec. The dark matter halo required to produce this dispersion must have an average density of 2.5^{+4.1}_{-1.9} solar mass/pc^3 within a sphere that encloses half the galaxy's stellar luminosity. This is the highest measured density of dark matter in the Local Group. Our results show that a significant fraction of the stars in Segue 1 may be binaries with the most probable mean period close to 10 years, but also consistent with the 180 year mean period seen in the solar vicinity at about 1 sigma. Despite this binary population, the possibility that Segue 1 is a bound star cluster with the observed velocity dispersion arising from the orbital motion of binary stars is disfavored by the multi-epoch stellar velocity data at greater than 99% C.L. Finally, our treatment yields a projected (two-dimensional) half-light radius for the stellar profile of Segue 1 of 28^{+5}_{-4} pc, in excellent agreement with photometric measurements.Comment: 15 pages, 19 figure

Creative producers international report

Creative Producers International was an international talent development programme which worked with 15 Creative Producers based in cities across the globe. Their areas of expertise ranged from contemporary art, place making and community engagement through to corporate collaboration, urban innovation and social activism. We have spent the last three years asking urgent questions about place, identity and public space, and exploring how arts and culture can be empowered to take a leading role in the development of our future cities. Our aim was to form and amplify a network of connected ecologies of practice that influence, challenge and support each other, and build an international bank of knowledge and experience around city change