Creative Activity Support for Discovering Effective Combinations

Creative activities based on combinations are now being carried on everywhere in the world. Whether or not the creative activity succeeds depends on the combinations used in it. Since there are tremendous numbers of candidate combinations, it is impossible to decide at a glance which should be used. Thus, there must be a method of efficiently discovering combinations which are effective in making creative activity a success. This paper proposes a method of discovering combinations that is effective in supporting creative activity. In the proposed method, the originality of each combination and the novelty perceived by users are estimated from the number of hits on Web pages containing the keywords in question, and the effectiveness of the combinations is judged. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 38(12): 99–111, 2007; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.20392