Idea generation techniques provide a variety of approaches for supporting an innovation process.Until recently, the space of techniques has been unstructured, and no clear guidelines have been available for the selection of an appropriate technique for a given innovation goal. We used the 'change of perspective' paradigm as an approach to study idea generation techniques with the aim of obtaining more structured and rigorous guidelines for generating ideas.This paper reports the results of an experiment that analysed the influence of the external stimuli characteristics on the idea generation. We introduce a new approach to characterise external stimuli for the change of perspective 'analogy' by using the criteria 'typical' and 'relevant'. Twenty-two people used the change of perspective 'analogy' in an ideation workshop with a set of different external stimuli. The result supports our assumption that the characteristic of an external stimulus affect the generation of ideas.
This paper describes a course in innovation offered to students at the University of Magdeburg inGermany. The course is based on the premise that idea generation can be viewed as a methodical discipline, and offers a unique combination of the psychological framework for creative thinking, the business background for innovation and state-of-theart creativity techniques. The course derives much of its impact from close cooperation with an innovation consulting company and enables the students to solve real-life ideation tasks supplied by local corporations and other organizations. The paper describes the goals and design of the course, its innovative features, its reception by students and concludes with benefits and experiences gained.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.