Ideation Process Research Articles

The Effects of Designers' Contextual Experience on the Ideation Process and Design Outcomes

Personal context-specific experience can affect how a designer evaluates a design problem and proposes solutions. However, this effect was seldom discovered in a quantitative manner in problem-solving design tasks. This paper uses empirical evidence and quantitative methods to show the effects of novice designers' contextual experience on design tasks, particularly as it relates to the design process and design outcomes. Thirty-three people performed two design tasks while their cognitive states were assessed using electroencephalography (EEG). Moreover, the objective ratings (i.e., quantity, novelty and quality) from prospective users were analyzed to gauge the effect of contextual experience on design outcomes. Results suggest that during ideation, contextual experience has a negative effect on mental states associated with creativity and also on the novelty evaluations of the proposed solutions in the tested design tasks. This research advances the development of design methods for novice designers.

The Creative Search for an Insight in Account Planning: An Absorptive Capacity Approach

In advertising agencies, insight is frequently sought to solve advertising problems. However, the ideation process of the account planner is not well understood. Viewing account planning through a lens of absorptive capacity suggests that planning is about identifying and assimilating external information about consumers for use in the creative process. Account planners thus need to search deliberately for insight and work hard to express it to the creatives, who then exploit it to develop powerful creative ideas. The study adopts an in-depth grounded theory investigation of the insight phenomenon among 20 Sydney-based account planners. The findings reveal that identifying and applying insight is a highly creative process. The account planner uses research, personal knowledge domains, challenging conventions, borrowed sources, and central narrative extension to search for insights. However, because not all insights are equal, this study also uncovered what account planners consider quality insight. These include attributes of originality, relatability, usability, and vision. These findings provide guidelines for marketers and account planners who seek insight in framing an advertising message.

Lighting Up the Bulb’s Station

This case study follows the entrepreneurial journey initiated by a group of undergraduate students in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and examines the decisions made and lessons learned along the way. Uncovering the intricacies of the process of business ideation, the case analyses the predisposing conditions that led to the establishment of the Bulb’s Station—a vending booth offering exclusively homemade food. A particular emphasis is placed on analysing the two major experiences that the partners had running the booth, namely, at the 2016 AUS Global Day and the 2016 UAE National Day Celebration at the American University of Sharjah (AUS). By providing detailed information regarding the type, variety, quantity and pricing of dishes on the menu, the reader is brought to estimate the extent to which the booth’s operation was successful at each of the two events. Based on prior challenges and shortcomings in adopted strategies, the partners are now confronted with the critical question of whether to turn the Bulb’s Station into a start-up company in the food industry in the UAE.

Documenting the Elusive and Ephemeral in Embodied Design Ideation Activities

Documenting embodied ideation activities is challenging, as they often result in ephemeral design constructs and elusive design knowledge difficult to document and represent. Here, we explore documentation forms designers can use internally during the design process in the domain of movement-based interaction in collocated, social settings. Using previous work and our experience from embodied ideation workshops, we propose three documentation forms with complementing perspectives of embodied action from a first and a third person view. We discuss how they capture ephemeral embodied action and elusive design and experiential knowledge, in relation to two interdependent aspects of documentation forms: their performativity and the medium they use. The novelty of these forms lies in what is being captured: ephemeral design constructs that emerge as designers engage with the embodied ideation activity; how it is portrayed: in aggregation forms that highlight elusive design knowledge; and their purpose: to clarify and augment analytical results improving the designer-researchers’ understanding of key aspects of the embodied ideation process and its outcomes, useful to advance the design process and for research dissemination.

Domestic coalitions in the variation of education privatization: an analysis of Chile, Argentina, and Colombia

Education privatization is a global trend that has nonetheless followed multiple trajectories. This article addresses the question of what explains this variation by demonstrating the role that political coalitions play in the re-interpretation of global privatization ideas. A political-coalitional approach helps us analyze from a long-term perspective, the interplay between ideational, political, and economic processes that occurred at the global and domestic levels. Both accumulated benefits and negative consequences of previous reforms realign domestic coalitions that then facilitate or constrain the selection of global ideas and shape the way in which they are implemented at the country level. Based on a comparative historical analysis of three countries, Chile, Argentina, and Colombia, the article identifies three privatization trajectories: marketization, erosion of public education, and dualization of education provision. The long-term analysis of these trajectories also shows that privatization is not a linear process but a complex dynamic with consequences that may trigger unintended changes in the future.

Aquel lejano Oeste: paradojas de la (in)movilidad en la ciudad de Santa Fe

Resumen El crecimiento desigual y fragmentado del borde Oeste de la ciudad de Santa Fe puede ser analizado en función de la movilidad e inmovilidad allí experimentada. Una paradoja materializada en el trazado de la Avenida Circunvalación en tanto espacio destinado a las altas velocidades y, al mismo tiempo, en tanto formalización de un límite y barrera al intercambio socio-espacial. Con el objetivo de revisar los fundamentos epistemológicos de las políticas urbanas que derivaron en omisiones y resoluciones tecnocráticas, este artículo propone recuperar la historicidad del proceso de ideación y planificación, a través de los diferentes documentos y planes urbanísticos confeccionados para la ciudad, enfocando el análisis en los modos en que fue concebido al margen Oeste en relación al Río Salado.

A Copycat Penalty: Micro Evidence From an Online Crowdsourcing Platform

Open innovation platforms that enable organizations to crowdsource ideation to parties external to the firm are proliferating. In many cases, the platforms use open contests that allow the free exchange of ideas with the goal of improving the ideation process. In open contests, participants (“solvers”) observe the ideas of others as well as the feedback received from the contest sponsor (“seeker”). The open nature of such contests generate incentives for imitating successful early designs by future solvers at the cost of the original solvers. As such, this creates the possibility of the platform unraveling when original solvers strategically withdraw from the platform, expecting their ideas will be copied without recompense. To investigate agent behavior in such a setting, we analyze publicly accessible micro-data on more than 6,000 design contests, submissions and participants from crowdsourced open ideation platforms and augment this analysis with field and online experiments. These data include the original image files submitted to the contests, which enable us to compare how similar one image is to another using a customized ensemble image comparison algorithm. We find that better rated designs are likely to be imitated by later entering solvers, thereby generating significant risk to early entrants that their ideas will be appropriated by later entrants without recompense. As a countervailing force, we document that seekers tend to reward original designs, and avoid picking as winners those that seem to be imitating and free-riding. Seekers perceive original designers as more competent, informing their design choice. These patterns suggest that market behavior on such platforms may have a self-policing component that disincentivizes excessive imitation, rewards originality and prevents unraveling.

The creative brain in the figural domain: Distinct patterns of EEG alpha power during idea generation and idea elaboration

This study investigated EEG activity in the upper alpha band during the well-known Picture Completion Task of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT), a widely used creative ideation task in the figural domain. The application of a sophisticated computerized version of the TTCT facilitating the online assessment and digitalizing of participant's drawings allowed to separate two central stages of the creative ideation process (i.e., idea generation and idea elaboration). During idea generation, the participants’ task was to generate an initial draft of an original and creative completion of the presented abstract lines and figures of the TTCT. During idea elaboration, the participants were required to mentally improve the originality of the initially generated idea/draft. Creative ideation in this figural task was generally associated with comparatively strong desynchronization of upper alpha power over parietal and occipital sites, indicating high visual/figural processing demands. Interestingly, the stage of idea elaboration was accompanied by a relative increase of upper alpha power at parietal and occipital sites compared to the stage of idea generation, indicating heightened top-down processing demands. Furthermore, task performance was associated with relative increases of upper alpha power at frontal sites and relative decreases at centro-temporal sites from the stage of idea generation to idea elaboration. This association suggests the importance of increased inhibitory control over stimulus-based bottom-up information and motor imagery in order to achieve more creative outputs. Taken together these findings add to the relevant literature in that they a) extend research on the relationship between EEG alpha activity and creativity to the figural domain, and b) support a multistage view of creative ideation, involving cognitive control and mental imagery as important components of creativity.

Exploring creative marketing thought: Divergent ideation processes and outcomes

AbstractMost marketing professionals deem creativity vital to successful marketing performance. However, while previous research has advanced an understanding of creative organizations, much less is known about the cognitive processes that direct the creative thinking of marketing professionals. This article presents a theoretical framework, the Divergent Marketing Thought Model (DMTM), that explores the ideation modes, processes, and outcomes involved in the generation of divergent marketing thought. The proposed model, which is based on a synthesis of research from psychology, marketing, and creativity, offers insight into specific divergent ideation processes that mediate the generation of creative marketing thought. Informed by the DMTM, several formal research propositions are advanced.

Social Media Utilization for the Service Innovation

This article describes how more and more enterprises are represented on online social networks. A significant number of these enterprises are uncertain to why they are present on the social technologies, while others have a clear strategy. These strategies include getting closer to the customers for new innovation and service creation. This article looks into how innovation takes place for enterprises using Facebook as their channel for starting service innovation in the meetings between the enterprise and the customer as part of their strategy to getting closer to the customers. The article takes a theoretical look on service innovation in the ICT service encounter, where the ICT relation is based on social media. Two Danish cases are presented (a bank and a mobile service provider) focusing on their use of Facebook in their ideation and innovation processes. Interviews and monitoring of Facebook activities are used as data sources to understand the ideation and innovation processes of the cases.

Visual Ideology and Social Imaginary: A New Approach to the Aesthetics of Globalization

Focusing on subjective processes of globalization, this practice-based research looks at the shift from the imaginary to the imaginary. In particular, it investigates major changes that are giving rise to a new regime of representation and signification in selected global and fast globalizing cities across the planet. In doing so, this study observes that the circulation of a particular type of socio-historically and ideologically charged global images is creating a new aesthetic affective landscape that is transforming urban spaces, increasingly mediating local-national meaning, while contributing to the destabilization of the modern self-contained nation-state. Yet, there is a dearth of scholarship investigating the link among social imaginary, ideology, and these new figures of knowledge of the global that constitute an ever-increasing cultural horizon within which people frame, with varying degrees and nuances, their phenomenological existence-everyday life. In this respect, it is argued that, to better understand globalization as a material and ideational process, one cannot disregard investigating its visual- ideological dimension. Thus, exemplified by a given body of images displayed in their own right, with one of them analyzed and interpreted to better understand the socio-political and cultural implications, this inquiry, theoretically and methodologically articulated, is carried out through photographic fieldwork and the lenses of and political theory. In doing so, it is observed that the production, circulation, and consumption of ideologically charged media representations in defined socio-historical contexts constitute the visual apparatus-the visual ideology-of globalization.

Identifying Product Opportunities Using Social Media Mining: Application of Topic Modeling and Chance Discovery Theory

As an emerging voice of the customer (VOC) containing feedback, such as opinions and expectations about products, social media data have the potential use for product improvement and new product development. However, most prior studies have focused on determining customer concerns, while neglecting to incorporate them into a systematic approach to identify product opportunities. In response, this paper suggests an approach to identify product opportunities from customer reviews in social media. This approach employs topic modeling to identify the product topics discussed by customers from large-scale review posts related to a given product. A keygraph is then constructed based on the co-occurrences among the topics contained in each post. The chance discovery theory is then applied to generate new product opportunities from the chance nodes obtained from the keygraph. Our approach contributes to the systematic ideation process for product opportunity analysis based on large-scale and real-time VOC.

Can technology adoption for older adults be co-created?

Technology can be very valuable to support older adults to remain healthy and active in their daily living. How to design technological product and service systems that will be adopted by older adults however still remains a challenge. This paper reports on an empirical study on how a co-creation ideation process can contribute to the technology adoption of older adults conducted in an EU project with multi-stakeholder teams with the aim of promoting physical activities of older adult citizens. This ideation process is adapted from Method A. By analyzing the co-creation ideation process from three different processes: the end user value-creation process, the stakeholder value-creation process and the encounter process in relation to the technology adoption process, i.e., the domestication adoption process, this paper demonstrates which technology adoption issues can be already addressed using this cocreation ideation process and which aspects still need to be taken further into account.

Investigating the effects of client imagery on the ideation process of graphic design

Prior work has examined how images supplied by design clients influence the output of graphic design ideation, however, little is known about the effect upon the ideation process itself. This article reports on an empirical study conducted with graphic design students engaged in design ideation. Findings are based on think-aloud protocol data, as well as participants' subjective ratings of their ideation process using factors based on the principle of design flow. Results show some statistically significant effects on the design process of the participants, particularly increases in their reported anxiety and sense of involvement in the task. In addition, some correlations are identified between design output resulting from exposure to client provided images, and the process of designing those outputs.

Employee involvement in ideation and healthcare service innovation quality

ABSTRACTThis study hypothesizes and empirically tests the influence of involvement of (1) frontline employees and (2) top managers in ideation process on healthcare service innovation quality. Based on data from 168 service innovation projects in Dutch healthcare organizations, the empirical results indicate that frontline employee involvement and top management involvement in, respectively, idea generation and idea application both improve the quality of healthcare service innovation. We find that the positive effect of frontline employee involvement is stronger under the condition of higher service innovativeness. In the direct relationship of top management involvement and healthcare service innovation quality, our data do not show such a moderating effect. The key and general managerial implication of the findings is that healthcare organizations are inspired to involve frontline employees in the idea generation processes and involve top managers in the idea application processes of service innovation projects, in order to improve innovation quality.

Adopting Seekers’ Solution Exemplars in Crowdsourcing Ideation Contests: Antecedents and Consequences

Crowd-based ideation contests facilitate solution-seeking firms (seekers) to address their problems by soliciting ideas from external individuals (solvers). In this study, we examine how seekers’ involvement—particularly in terms of the exemplars and prizes that they provide—shape the ideation process and outcomes in such contests. Although seekers’ decisions about the exemplars to show and prizes to offer may be independent from one another, we show that certain aspects of these decisions jointly impact the extent to which solvers adopt seekers’ exemplars in their ideas. This finding demonstrates that individual facets of seeker involvement could intertwine and have intricate effects on solvers right from the initiation of the contests. We further show that, by influencing solvers’ exemplar adoption, seekers can also affect the effectiveness of the ideas. All in all, our results indicate that seekers acquire ideas not just through the crowd but also with the crowd, and they play an active role in how and what solvers ideate. Instead of simply delegating idea generation to solvers, seekers should thus share the onus of ideation and be aware of the impacts of their involvement in contests.

Exploratory Study of the Qualities that Distinguish Potential from Realized Innovators

This study explored the similarities and differences between 36 accomplished and 36 hopeful innovators in a large midwestern city in the United States. Both groups reported a higher frequency of recognized ideas when creative thinking occurred in the morning and under conditions of a state of calm. Realized Innovators uniquely approached the ideation process by intentionally applying a set of processes they found reliably effective. Potential Innovators were less deliberate in their approach to idea generation and were more likely to pursue activities with weak associations to creative outputs.

Moderating Ideation in Web‐Enabled Ideation Systems

While organizations increasingly implement web‐enabled ideation systems to access the collective intelligence of their distributed employees, recent studies show that most attempts to use these systems underperform or fail. This article draws on a qualitative case study of the Ericsson system “Idea Boxes” to explore a novel approach to manage ideation based on the use of the moderator role. The aim of this study is to understand to what extent and how the introduction of moderators can contribute to a better management of web‐enabled ideation systems and to overcome the shortcomings commonly associated with their use. The contribution of this study to innovation literature is threefold. First, it develops a conceptual framework that gives insights into the practices implemented by moderators to manage ideation, namely: (1) formulating an ideation strategy, (2) combining means for community building, and (3) formalizing the ideation process. It focuses on unfolding their key complementarities. Second, this study relates these practices to the shortcomings of web‐enabled ideation systems with respect to the sourcing, filtering, and handling of employees' ideas. It discusses how the identified practices can help organizations address these shortcomings by stimulating sustained employee participation, increasing the quality and fit of the ideas generated, and ensuring their efficient selection and integration. Third, this article compares moderators to other innovation roles discussed in the new product development literature with the aim of broadening the future research agenda toward an investigation of emerging organizational roles having limited formal authority to manage innovation. The findings of this study provide valuable guidelines to managers to implement more sophisticated approaches for a better management of the ideation process through web‐enabled ideation tools.

Designing Integrated Management Criteria of Creative Ideation Based on Fuzzy Delphi Analytical Hierarchy Process

In the more competitive new economy, recognizing and designing criteria and parameters to strengthen idea generating is vital so that these ideas will be used for the development of industries and the whole country. This paper designs a model for integrated management of creative ideation. Accordingly, we examine target population of 22 professors and entrepreneurs to determine priority of parameters that we define, and encourage them to propose new parameters to be added into the model, and these parameters improve ideation process. Therefore, we conduct an online survey, which employs snowball sampling method. After gathering data and determining weights of parameters based on fuzzy Delphi analytical hierarchy process, we rank each criterion’s parameters based on the opinions of the panelists and finally we design the model. This research suggests that an organization establishes to work on the principles based on the criteria and prioritized parameters that this paper specifies in its model. In addition, it proposes designing a web-based system within the organization, in which the system provides a database of creative ideas and manages processes in different levels (idea creation, idea training, and practical) to motivate intellectuals to generate new ideas, and facilitate the connection between creative thinkers and industry.

Elliptic Fourier analysis and perceptual matching for the evaluation of bioinspired sketching in conceptual design

AbstractBiologically inspired design can be used to aid in conceptual design. Sketching is an important ideation process in conceptual design for recording and evaluating flashing moments of inspiration. The present study aims to provide a framework for exploring the effects of biological examples on the sketching contours of products, as well as the perceptual matching degree between design ideas generated via sketching and the desired functions. Elliptic Fourier descriptors with principal component analysis and perceptual matching were used to evaluate and compare the effects of biological examples, no examples, and human-engineered examples from different product categories and within one product category on the sketches in an experiment that involved 28 participants. The application of elliptic Fourier descriptors with principal component analysis shows that there are significant differences in the third and seventh principal components. It is also found that exposure to biological examples can produce more sketches with high perceptual matching degree than the other three conditions, but there are no significant effects of the example exposure on the Pearson correlation coefficients of semantic differential evaluation value vectors between design problems and sketches. These results demonstrate that exposure to biological examples will correlate with Elliptic Fourier descriptors of sketches and will not significantly increase the perceptual matching degree between sketches and the desired function.