The use of creative stimuli at early stages of industrial product innovation

Abstract

Creative ideas are essential to original concept generation and ultimately innovation. But where and when do these vital creative ideas occur during product innovation and more importantly how can they be influenced? The following paper describes an industrially-based study of several innovation projects following the actual processes of professional designers. Some ideas from the early brainstorm can be traced all the way through to concepts that are selected at the company's stage gate. Those early ideas are marked as 'appropriate' which provides an objective evaluation of the influence of any prescribed creative stimuli being used during the brainstorm sessions in relation to the output of the innovation process. The results showed that the frequency of idea production remained roughly constant during the first 30 minutes but steadily reduced after this period.However, the number of 'appropriate' ideas decreased rapidly, where 75% of the appropriate ideas in the first 30minutes had been expressed after just 15minutes. By introducing various forms of stimuli to the groups, the frequency of idea generation was maintained and in many cases increased. The stimuli were also shown to help generate more appropriate ideas which were included within concepts proposed at the stage-gate.

An original design approach for stimulating the ideation of new product features

“…In addition, administering manifold and continuous stimuli can give rise to considerable workload and perceptible mental stress, which are, in turn, judged as phenomena producing enhanced design creativity [43,44]. This circumstance finds confirmation in the effectiveness of analogies in idea generation tasks that involve designers for a large amount of time, thus avoiding productivity drops observed after approximately 30 min [45].…”

An Overview of Folding Techniques in Architecture Design

“…Current studies about folding techniques in architecture design mainly focus on exploring the similarity and taxonomical relations between folding techniques and architecture design, which are the principles of "concept abstraction" and "concept blending". Nevertheless, the primitive being "concept integration" is proved to led to higher creativity and the principle of "concept integration" is thematic relations, hence future researches are suggested to explore more about the thematic relations between folding techniques and architecture design to achieve higher creativity in architecture design, especially at early stages of architecture innovation [24].…”

Ideias para a inovação: um mapeamento sistemático da literatura

“…Brainstorming (4): Diehl & Stroebe (1991); Sutton & Hargadon (1996); Howard et al (2011);Valacich et al (1994). Howard et al (2010) and Valacich et al (1994) discuss the technique which is perhaps the most mentioned technique for generating and improving ideas: the brainstorming. Overall, studies show that a greater effectiveness in generating ideas is achieved when they are generated separately and combined at a later stage.…”