Individual Exploration, Sensemaking, and Innovation: A Design for the Discovery of Novel Information

Abstract

Discovering novel information can result in the generation of potentially valuable new ideas and can therefore be beneficial to organizations interested in innovation. To be useful, novel information must have a particular relationship to existing organizational knowledge. It must be far enough away to qualify as novel, but it must be close enough that it can be understood and exploited. Therefore, a key challenge for novel‐information discovery (NID) is to find concepts that have such relationships to a given starting point or focal concept of interest. Despite the potential benefits, organizations face a number of challenges when discovering novel information on the Web: locating it, understanding its relevance, and making sense of it given the constraints and biases of existing mental models. In this article, we develop an understanding of the challenges of NID and how a tool can support individuals in locating and translating novel information into novel ideas. Using a design science approach, we develop a design theory for NID. A prototype is developed and evaluated. Our findings show that an NID tool performs better than other Web search tools such as Google in terms of the perceived levels of novel information provided and radicalness of the ideas generated.

A literature review on individual creativity support systems

“…(2) having a user-extendable library of previous ideas, cases or solutions (Althuizen & Wierenga, 2014;Dominowski & Dallob, 1996;Herring et al, 2009;Hewett, 2005); (3) enabling effective search of the knowledge and information above (Jenkin, Chan, Skillicorn, & Rogers, 2013). In this way, the function of long term memory, providing mental elements for ideation, is supplemented.…”

“…The growing amount of data in the Internet and its accessibility enable new opportunities in devising creativity support systems. Moreover, new approaches for retrieving relevant knowledge (e.g., Jenkin et al, 2013) can be applied to various sources of external knowledge and provide raw materials for creative work.…”

Information system users’ creativity

“…One more research area looks at the creative use of IT (Wang et al, 2013). The integration of external knowledge into the creative process has also received considerable research attention (Chang et al, 2014;Dennis et al, 2013;Jenkin et al, 2013; N. Kim et al, 2013;Ren et al, 2014;Tang, 2014). Additionally researchers have emphasized various types and aspects of feedback in creative-process facilitation (F. Chen et al, 2014;Hildebrand et al, 2013), recognition of creative solutions within virtual environments , individual mental aspects (Nguyen and Zeng, 2014), and creative tasks and goals formulation (Fabricatore and López, 2013;Gong et al, 2013).…”

Extending the 4I Organizational Learning Model: Information Sources, Foraging Processes and Tools

“…A knowledge map can highlight clusters related to a topic and the relationships between these clusters, making it easier for the individual to understand and make sense of the topic, sub-topics and relationships between them. Tags and tag clouds can also help individuals make sense of the results [21,22,30]. It is also conceivable that some tools facilitate intuiting by highlighting patterns and drawing them to the attention of the individual user, as is the case with some data mining tools.…”