TY - JOUR

T1 - Reuse of ideas and concepts for creative stimuli in engineering design

A1 - Howard,Thomas J.

A1 - Culley,Steve J.

A1 - Dekoninck,Elies A.

AU - Howard,Thomas J.

AU - Culley,Steve J.

AU - Dekoninck,Elies A.

PB - Taylor & Francis Ltd.

PY - 2011

Y1 - 2011

N2 - Creative idea generation is essential to novel concept development and ultimately innovation. The following paper describes an extensive industry-based study investigating the use of creative stimuli during a brainstorming session at the conceptual stages of design.A new approach to retrieving creative stimuli referred to as ‘Sweeper’ is proposed, which sources stimuli internal to a company’s information repository. This creative stimuli tool is then compared to other creative stimuli tools using objective, industrially grounded performance criteria. This study provides an arguably much needed real, industrially-based experiment regarding brainstorming. The results and observations suggest that having a guided approach to sourcing creative stimuli is very beneficial. The use of the TRIZ contradiction matrix and inventive principles is also shown to be a good example of a guided approach in terms of increasing creative performance. However, the Sweeper tool using internally sourced stimuli provides a method that is useful and more a practical alternative, as it is based firmly in the domain of activity.

AB - Creative idea generation is essential to novel concept development and ultimately innovation. The following paper describes an extensive industry-based study investigating the use of creative stimuli during a brainstorming session at the conceptual stages of design.A new approach to retrieving creative stimuli referred to as ‘Sweeper’ is proposed, which sources stimuli internal to a company’s information repository. This creative stimuli tool is then compared to other creative stimuli tools using objective, industrially grounded performance criteria. This study provides an arguably much needed real, industrially-based experiment regarding brainstorming. The results and observations suggest that having a guided approach to sourcing creative stimuli is very beneficial. The use of the TRIZ contradiction matrix and inventive principles is also shown to be a good example of a guided approach in terms of increasing creative performance. However, the Sweeper tool using internally sourced stimuli provides a method that is useful and more a practical alternative, as it is based firmly in the domain of activity.

KW - TRIZ

KW - creativity and innovation

KW - innovation methods

KW - human creativity

KW - knowledge and information management

KW - design reuse

U2 - 10.1080/09544821003598573

DO - 10.1080/09544821003598573

JO - Journal of Engineering Design

JF - Journal of Engineering Design

SN - 0954-4828

IS - 8

VL - 22

SP - 565

EP - 581

ER -