Creativity Support at the Workplace

In this paper, we discuss creativity as a form of learning from the perspective of idea generation in the creative process. We analyze forms of creativity and present the statement-based creativity techniques. Based on these concepts a tool prototype IdeaTrigger is presented and verified. It shows the advantages for innovative activity, especially in collaborative environment. 1 Creative Work and Creativity Support Creativity can be seen as the hallmark of intelligent work. As Europe’s future is seen as a knowledge economy [KE09], intelligent and creative work will become increasingly important. While sometimes creativity is seen mostly in the context of the Arts, we see creativity as a general phenomenon, which is relevant to each and every kind of complex problem solving [Bod04]. From this perspective, creativity is treated as a process to find solutions, which is also referred to innovative activity and involves both idea generation and idea management. As idea generation is an activity to retrieve existing knowledge from memory and to combine them into novel ones, it can be regarded as a form of learning in the sense of psychological activity. People acquire new knowledge, not by being taught or by acquiring in other ways existing knowledge, but rather they develop this knowledge anew, as it does not exist yet. Creativity is by definition hardly predictable, thus supporting it effectively is very difficult. In this paper, we will describe an approach towards integrating domain-independent creativity support effectively in a workplace environment. As creativity support we will regard any kind of methodological or IT support that enables people to be more creative, both in terms of quality and quantity of their ideas. Our approach relies on established creativity techniques, integrates several techniques and aims to automatize as much as possible of the information handling. The work, we describe here, is part of the IdSpace project, an ongoing EU project which aims at developing an enterprise portal that supports ongoing learning and creative work, with a specific focus on product innovation [IDS09]. This paper is structured as follows: in Section 2, we discuss the notion of creativity techniques and will discuss some psychological background research on human creativity. In Section 3, we discuss a very important subclass of creativity techniques, i.e., statement-based creativity techniques and an example is presented to illustrate the mechanism. In Section 4, we discuss a tool concept for creativity support. In Section 5, we discuss some experiences we gathered so far, while applying the underlying approach. Finally in Section 6, we summarize and conclude. 2 Creativity Techniques The phenomenon of creativity has triggered a lot of research, especially in psychology [Bod04, Ste99]. Several models have been developed as part of this research. Some models focus on the creative product (i.e., what makes a product a creative product) or on the creative person (e.g., questionnaires that help to identify creative traits in people). However, the work which interests us most focuses on the creative process. This tells us how creative products are generated and understanding this is key for supporting learners to be more creative. Various models of the creative process have been described over time. Perhaps the most well-known (and simplistic) model is the Wallas-Model [Wal26]. It consists of the stages preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. Here, illumination characterizes the event of “having the idea”, and verification describes the necessity of making sure that the idea is correct. A different, well-known categorization is given by the various types of creativity as described by Boden [Bod04]: she differentiates exploration, transformation, combination and evaluation. A rather detailed model of creativity is the IPC-model of the creative process [Sch95]. This model also provided a basis for a categorization of various AI techniques to better understand how AI can contribute to creativity [Sch96]. As a result of psychological work in creativity techniques, a large number of techniques have been described [Myc09], which aim at supporting people in developing creative ideas. Probably, the most well-known technique is brainstorming [Osb53]. As part of our research, we collected, analyzed, and categorized a very large number of techniques [GS+08]. One interesting fact we have found is, although there are already a large number of creativity techniques, current creativity tools as software, either commercial tools or free tools, are mostly implementing the mind mapping creativity technique as a way to organize ideas[GS+08]. However, there is a special kind of creativity techniques, which describe a set of principles for innovative activity. These principles are guidance for people to generate idea. In this paper, we focus our discussion on such creativity techniques, which we call statement-based creativity techniques. Statement-based creativity techniques are creativity techniques which direct creativity sessions by a set of principles that can be represented as a number of questions. Example is 5W1H providing who, what, when, where, why, and how questions to answer in a creativity session. Those questions are called statements. In order to select specific techniques and combine them in specific situations, we introduced the following categories: • Context factors – they describe the elicitation context in which the techniques can be applied. • Operation types – within the creative process different forms of creativity operations can be distinguished. • Main activity groups – we identify six groups that emphasize the underlying approach of the techniques. The context factors describe under which circumstances one of the approaches can be successfully applied. This includes questions like whether the approach can only be used by a single person or in a group, does it require physical interaction among the people (i.e., can it only be used by groups of people who can physically interact), and so on. The operation types are given by the four types that Boden distinguishes as 1 A more detailed description can be found in [GS08]. This list is only an excerpt of the full set of categorization dimensions. These categories are also given in [GS+08]. given above (Exploration, Validation, Transformation, and Combination). The third dimension, the main activity groups, consists of the following categories: