Getting Down to Business: Using Speedstorming to Initiate Creative Cross‐Disciplinary Collaboration

Abstract

Creative collaborations that cross disciplinary boundaries are essential to innovation. Individuals face challenges, however, in forming new collaborations. Empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that the common formats of brainstorming and free-form networking are insufficient for enabling such collaborations to form. We present a potential solution called speedstorming, a pair-wise method of creative interaction similar to the round-robin 'speeddating' technique. Speedstorming combines an explicit purpose, time limits, and one-on-one encounters to create a setting where boundary-spanning opportunities can be recognized, ideas can be explored at a deep level of interdisciplinary expertise, and potential collaborators can be quickly assessed. A comparison of speedstorming and brainstorming suggests that ideas from speedstorming were more technically specialized and that speedstorming participants were more certain in their assessments of the collaborative potential of others. This paper concludes with a discussion of the method's application in a variety of settings.

Counterbalancing Exploitative Knowledge Search during Environmental Dynamism: Reinforcing New Ideas for Existing Products

“…In this way, a scattergun approach with many off‐strategy ideas can be avoided (Cooper & Edgett, ). Furthermore, the possibility for meaningful exchanges among participants increases, rather than simply conforming to social norms of ‘making small talk’ (Joyce et al., ). Therefore, the first step of the action was designed to clarify the problem to be solved and achieve a common agreement on the goal of the action.…”

Creative synergy in interdisciplinary design collaboration : using speedstorming to generate ideas

“…Therefore, more time for ideation might be important in a design context. This is also indirectly supported by Joyce et al (2010) in their suggestion that more time in each round would be needed if the goal is to produce more thorough, fully developed proposals.…”

“…Very recently, a new technique called speedstorming has been developed specifically for facilitating interdisciplinary interaction and capitalizing on team diversity and the resulting creative potential (Hey et al 2009;Joyce et al 2010). Even though speedstorming was developed in the field of nanoscience as a way of improving the process of finding interdisciplinary research collaborations, preliminary investigation has shown great prospects for the successful sharing and integration of diverse knowledge, and the synergistic generation of creative ideas (Joyce et al 2010). This has led to a great opportunity to further investigate the benefits of speedstorming for idea-generation.…”

“…All of the research that has been done to date on speedstorming has been done by Grossman and his colleagues (Hey et al 2009;Joyce et al 2010) in the context of enhancing interdisciplinary collaborations in the field of nanoscience research. As reported by Hey et al…”

“…Furthermore, it may be possible that the short time limits designed into the speedstorming process are not as suitable for design ideation as they may be for identifying potential interdisciplinary research partnerships or generating proposal ideas for research projects. Ideas for design solutions may require more depth, and the output is something different than a simple title (as part of the previous study on speedstorming ;Joyce et al 2010). Therefore, more time for ideation might be important in a design context.…”