In ‘Managing Technological Innovation in Business

in the innovation process

Bert Stevens

h.w.stevens@student.utwente.nl

University of Twente,

Faculty Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Keywords

Idea generation, creative problem solving, new product development, software tool support, groupware, electronic meeting system, mindmap

Abstract

This paper gives an answer to the question how groupware can contribute to creative problem solving. Groups of people trying to creatively tackle problems are the heart innovation. We’ll summarize research that shows more and better ideas can be generated with help of groupware by overcoming some inherent problems of idea generation. By combining in-depth insight about how groups come to new ideas, and how our brain works, we’ll gather the elements of successful idea generation. We’ll use this knowledge to evaluate two common commercial available tools.

1. INTRODUCTION

In ‘Managing Technological Innovation in Business Organizations’ Ralph Katz analyses the challenge of what he calls Dualism: Efficiently managing today’s business but also being innovate. He defines Technological innovation as the combination or synthesis of knowledge into new products or services [KAT 03]. John Bessant also looks at innovation from several perspectives. A straight-forward and formal definition of innovation comes from the Innovation Unit of the U.K department of Trade and Industry who define innovation as ‘the successful implementation of new ideas’. From a more practical point of view Bessant states that ‘innovation is fundamentally about creative problem-solving’ [BES 04]. This creative problem-solving process will be the focus of our study.

2. PROBLEM STATEMENT

Innovation can take the form of an incremental product improvement or a radical new product for a new market. All forms of innovation have in common is that they start with new ideas that solve perceived problems. In this research paper we’ll dive into the group idea generation and selection literature. We’ll look at the role of creative problem solving in innovation, the specifics of idea generation and how we can support this group process using ICT tools. The central question for this report will be:

How can software tool support enhance the idea generation and selection process?

3. RESEARCH QUESTIONS

To formulate an answer to the problem statement we distinguish several research questions:

1.How do we define idea generation and selection in

the context of the innovation process?

2.What is needed for successful idea generation and

selection (in terms of input, techniques, process,

output)?

3.In what ways can software groupware tools support

this process taking into account the requirements for

of idea generation?

4.How do popular groupware tools take into account

these notions from our research?

The scope of the research is limited by the idea generation and selection processes in innovation. Another limitation is that we only look at tools to support a group, not individuals. A last borderline that limits us is that we don’t intent to go into the psychological origins of creativity. In this paper we’ll sometimes use ‘creative problem solving instead of ‘idea generation and selection’, in chapter 6 we’ll see that the second is a large subset of the first.

4. RESEARCH METHOD

The study will be based on a literature review of the existing literature on idea generation, new product development and groupware meeting tools.

For the first two research questions, literature about the innovation process will be used, and especially about idea generation during new product development. A lot of literature on this subject has been published. To get a clear picture we’ll specifically look for empirical research.

For the next question, we’ll dive into electronic tool support / groupware systems, in relation with the 1st research question. Since this is not a relatively new subject, several studies have been conducted with the combination of idea generation and groupware.

To answer the last research question, a search on the internet will be conducted to look for commercial and academic tools.. For the first three questions we searched several sources:

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2nd Twente Student Conference on IT , Enschede 21January,2005 Copyright 2005, University of Twente, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science• University Twente Catalog

• Emerald Reviews

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The search words were (a subset of) :

innovation and ((idea and generation) or "new product design"

or synectics or (brainstorming and creativity))

5.IDEA GENERATION AS PART OF

INNOVATION

To clarify the links between the innovation process and its

surroundings Ichimura [ICH 03] suggests the view of a ‘product

innovation system’ as in figure 1.

Figure 1: The basic concept of product innovation

Idea generation takes places in the innovation process. Ichimura sees innovation as fusion of existing knowledge from several inputs. Smith [SMI 03] defines idea generation as the

mental production of possibilities. He notes that studies from

various disciplinary studies have identified the considerable role

of reflective thought in the discovery process. Being shaped by

past experience it is knowledge-intensive process. Smith boldly

states: ‘Innovations embody elements of the past; nothing is

totally now or unprecedented’. On the other hand the

knowledge intensive nature of innovation creates the potential

for idea generation to be intelligently disciplined and directed.

This opens the door for groupware support.

We’ve seen the fusion role of idea generation in innovation. On

the other hand we need to acknowledge that this fusion is more

then the sum of parts, this not a best answer to a math equation

but more like cooking a meal. It’s about the little extra you add

yourself. You won’t impress the market with a meal that the

competitor already serves, or an idea from a consultant or

management book. Radical new ideas might offer the ultimate

competitive advantage that you can only create yourself.

6. ELEMENTS OF SUCCESFULL IDEA GENERATION AND SELECTION

So if idea generation is a form of problem solving, why bother

to do it in a group instead of handing it over to the wisest employee? Briggs [BRI 97] has some strong arguments for that: •Complexity. Problems are often so complex that no one has all the understanding, information, and resources to

solve the problem alone.

•Evaluation. A group of people is often more capable of providing a reality-check for proposed solutions than is the individual proposing the solution. •Acceptance. When all the stakeholders are represented and they feel their interests are taken into account they will stand behind the implementation of the solution. •Synergy. People involved in creative problem solving processes often build on one another's ideas leveraging their different talents and knowledge. This synergy can lead to new, rich ideas that may not have otherwise occurred.

Another element of successful idea generation is diverging. Santanen has grouped a rich literature base that suggests that people facing large, complex problems tend to think within a bounded, familiar, and narrow subset of the solution space rather than thinking creatively. In complex problem solving, people can overlook as much as 80% of the potential solution space and even be unaware that they are doing so [SAN 99]. In daily work people use heuritics from their area of profession. A chemist might think in terms of reactions and mixtures, a manager in terms of control mechanisms, an accountant in terms of transactions and keeping balance. These solution directions and tools normally empower them, but now they have to learn to put them aside for a moment and think outside their solution domain.

Walravens [WAL 97]calls this phase diverging (see figure 2). Before diverging comes the warming up phase, where the mental muscles are warmed up by exercises that promote shouting strange ideas. This creates an atmosphere where any idea can be shared without judgement or criticism. Walravens has 6 ground rules for this phase:

1.Freewheeling

2.Quantity above quality (of ideas)

3.Xenogamy ( combining of ideas , ‘kruisbestuiving’ in

Dutch)

4.No for of criticism during idea generation

5.Writing everything down

6.Listening

After the warming up comes the problem analysis and (re)formulation phase. Is the problem really that we want more cost efficiency in the process or is the time-to-delivery the problem? Aren’t we trying to solve the symptom instead of the core problem? In this phase it is possible to make a problem clew to analyse cause and effect relationships

Smith [SMI 03] points out important points to keep in mind, especially for this phase:

1.The generation of innovative ideas can be helped by

visualizing the problem and highlighting relationships

and analogies.

The 5 phases of creative problem solving

1.Warming up

2.Problem analysis and (re)definition

3.Diverging (idea generation)

4.Converging (idea evaluation)

5.Selection of (a) solution(s)

Figure 2 Phases of creative problem solving2.Decomposition, breaking large problems down into

many simple ones, is the most important strategy for

invention.

With the clear problem formulation we go into the diverging phase. During diverging several techniques can be applied to stimulate freewheeling of thoughts and generating ideas. Walravens [WAL 97] describes techniques from various authors (synectics, morphological analysis, brainstorming, analogies, trigger technique, wishful thinking and the Delphi technique).

Figure 3 The idea curve over time

After the diverging phase has generated a lot of ideas the converging phase transforms them into a evaluated and prioritized list. This is done by techniques that for instance group similar ideas and do a quick benefit/costs estimations. The importance of thinking outside your box to foster new ideas is also supported by our psychological understanding of creativity. Santanen [SAN 99] models creativity in the Cognitive Network Model of Creativity. His findings indicate that the creativity of a solution is a function of the degree to which frames that were previously distant from one another become strongly associated during problem solving.

Do you know how a computer works at the lowest level? It has quite some similarities with your brain. You might think that the mp3 you’re listening to and the document your editing is loaded from your hard disk, the long term memory of your pc. No, the part of your pc that actually does that work is the CPU, and it only talks to the super fast short term memory that you know as RAM or internal memory. Therefore what you can do at once is limited to amount of RAM. Your own short term memory, the things you can actively think of at once, is limited in the same way. The average amount of internal memory of a human is not 256 MB but 7 ‘frames’ of knowledge (see [SAN 99] for details).

During creative problem solving we are combining those frames that are in short term memory. When we are trying to cross a river, the concepts leaves, photosynthesis, green, eureka, branches, wood, fire, water, piranhas will not get us a working combination, but tree, river, float might help us to get the idea of building a bridge or raft. Santanen [SAN 99] describes the process of ‘chunking’ several frames into one to reduce the cognitive load. He defines chunking as ‘several frames that are simultaneously and repeatedly salient become coded into a new, more abstract chunk that contains a richer set of information’. In our example problem we chunked leaves, green, branches, wood into the more abstract container tree.

This supports the problem reformulation phase and grouping/abstracting techniques during the diverging and convergation phase. This supports diverging techniques like morfological analysis. We also reformulated the problem from crossing the river to bridge building. We can therefore ignore fire and photosynthesis and free our memory banks. In the words of Santanen: ‘The reduction in cognitive load can lead to more available resources for processing the contents of short term memory and, ultimately, to more creative solutions’. In other words the innovative thought should be constrained to the problem one is trying to solve.

In this chapter we summarized the most important ingredients for successful idea generation, gathered as a combined view from several authors. We saw that creative problem solving is typically a group activity for reasons of complexity, synergy, evaluation and acceptance. We also identified the typical phases of creative problem solving, with support from them from several viewpoints. We also highlighted the importance of focussing (limited RAM), ‘thinking outside the box’ and delaying any form of criticism on ideas.

7. GROUPWARE AND IDEA GENERATION

Our third research question is about how groupware can support idea generation taking into account the ingredients from our previous chapter.

First of all we define groupware as software to support cooperation in a group. The use of software for a group might sound logical since we determined in the previous chapter that creative problem solving is best done in a group. However, decades of research on brainstorming have led to a very clear and surprising outcome: For a given set of individuals, one can get both more ideas and more quality ideas by having them work by themselves and pooling their ideas (the so-called nominal group) than by working together as an interacting group [HYM 92]. And this is not the only problem with group work. Maybe you’ll recognize this anecdote from a meeting you’ve attended:

Imagine a tough strategy meeting at Skunk B.V. with serious implications about redistribution of organizational resources. All members’ have different hopes for the outcome but must work together to develop a plan. After the CEO has explained the problem the most talkative person, the marketing director, begins suggesting courses of action. The director of engineering immediately interrupts to argue against the proposals. His words are a little strong, and as usual the discussion degenerates into an ego-defending turf battle. The chairman comes in and brings the meeting to order, and the production manager offers a suggestion. The marketing director interrupts to disagree before the production manager finishes his first thought. After a long meeting the group has not actually considered the exact nature of their problems, much less generated ideas or arrived at a consensus about what to do (based on example from [BRIG 97]).

We’ve now looked at problems with creative problem solving in groups both from theory and practice. In this chapter we’ll look at how groupware can overcome these problems and at the same time use the other ingredients from the previous chapter for successful creative problem solving.

Let us return to the dissatisfying results from the ‘nominal group’ at the beginning of this chapter and take a look if groupware can help. We concluded that creative problem solving can be best done in a group for several reasons. However ‘nominal group’ research shows that a group is outperformed, counted by the number of ideas generated, by a ‘group’ who’s members work in serial. What is causing thisunexpected result and how can groupware help to solve it? McLaughin [MCL 01] offers several reasons for this in random order:

1)First of all people are afraid for critique on their ideas

and therefore don’t share them, a killer for idea

generation. This is supported by the 4th ground rule

of idea generation that Walravens [WAL 97] proposes

and we already saw this common prerequisite for

brainstorming in the previous chapter.

2) A second reason for the performance problem is ‘free

riding’ of members on the groups effort and bringing

in little new ideas themselves.

3)Although members might inspire others with their

ideas their also pushing the group along over 1 line in

1 direction.

4)The fourth and most important problem is called

‘production blocking’. During a group session people

have to share ‘air time’ they can not spit out their

ideas all at once, this is called output blocking. Prante [PRA 02] studies computer supported idea generation and comes up with a general set of requirements for such tools. He recognizes the production blocking problem and also marks it as the most important problem of the nominal group. Although we agree with this conclusion we think we also need to recognize the problem of ‘input blocking’. People in an idea generation session also read the ideas of other group members, they could even spend all their time on reading without the time of producing any idea themselves.

Prante also investigated a mindmap tool in comparison with a whiteboard. A mindmap makes it possible to structure ideas in a hierarchical manner (tree). Prante found that structuring the idea space leads to fewer ideas. The reason for this is increased production blocking: people need time to read the structure and also find the place to put a new idea. Also this kind of structure might people back into their existing thinking patterns instead of freewheeling. On the other hand structuring can be very useful in the selection phase where ideas are grouped and combined.

We now arrived at a point where we can summarize our findings into a list of points the ideal groupware package should comply to, to optimally support creative problem solving. Problem analysis

•Support for analyse the problem, its causes, consequences and reformulation/selection of the problem to solve. Diverging

•Anonymous and parallel submission of ideas, so even tough the boss is in the room this will not get you in a sweat.

•Unstructured method for report ideas

• A limit on the flow of ideas of others that a participant sees, to prevent input blocking

Idea evaluation

•Grouping and structuring of ideas

Idea selection •Anonymous polling. According to Briggs [BRI 97] this is an excellent way to open up discussions that have become stalled. Also anonymity increases the number of ideas generated by a group.

•Storage of all ideas/groups/polls and the selected idea (if some ideas are not stored this is a form of evaluation). 8. GROUPWARE FOR IDEA GENERATION IN PRACTICE

This final chapter is dedicated to the practice of using groupware for creative problem solving. We’re looking at two tools in perspective of our conclusion from the previous chapter. We’ll also look at some practical surrounding issues like electronic brainstorming and group size, room layout and the role of a meeting leader.

At lot had been written about the effect of group size on the number of ideas generated. As we have seen in the last chapter more people is more ideas but at a certain point production blocking stalls the curve. Gallupe and his team have done research on the effect of electronic brainstorming supported by GroupSystem (a system that will be analyzed later on in this chapter) [GAL 02]. His results from various experiments show that if a group gets bigger then 6 people, the number of unique ideas generated doesn’t grow. On the other hand a group of 12, using the tool, got a 186% productivity increase. Gallupe draws the conclusion that it is unproductive to have a large group of people brainstorm together without the support of a computer and the right tools. Room layout is preferably kept the same as normal meetings; all members in one room to enable face to face contact. Computer monitors are often (partly) sunk into the table to enable this, although in the case of modern laptop computers it is already possible to look over them. Sometimes also a central large presentation screen is used by the group leader. In contrast to normal meetings corporations often hire an external consultant to lead to a creative problem solving session. Reasons for this are expertise and objectivity. The role of the session leader is to structure the meeting, explain the techniques and get the group rolling again when it gets stuck. In the Netherlands it’s some companies are known to use groupware for creative problem solving (KPN, ministry of spatial planning, Nationale Nederlanden, Amsterdam police force, etc)[BRIG 97]. Although they could use any tool on the market we will look at two tools here. First we will look at Netmeeting, a common and free tool that goes along any windows installation and includes white boarding, chat, file sharing and video. The second tool is GroupSystems for windows by the Arizona University, from now on called GS. We will analyze these tools for support of the creative problem solving phases we identified in last the previous chapter, also taking in account other requirements we gathered like for instance anonymous and parallel submission of ideas and polling. During the analysis we will mark some hypothetical problems from our theoretic viewpoint.

Netmeeting is the most basic it can get, by offering only a whiteboard and private/group chat. The whiteboard offers some support for the diverging phase and storing ideas. The whiteboard enables parallel submission of ideas. Advantages here over a blackboard are concurrent and anonymous submission of ideas. What’s failing is support to restructure the problem at the beginning and structure the ideas after the divagation phase (and storing the result). Also support for specific idea generation techniques to increase the number ofideas is lacking. The same goes for idea evaluation techniques, for instance polling, reverse brainstorming and itemized response [WAL 97]. It is possible though to partly fill this gap by using a non-groupware tool like MindManager to play around with a hierarchical structure on a central presentation screen (see figure 4). MindManager allows the structure to be changed easily at every level and also store it.

A more elaborate groupware system for creative problem solving is GroupSystem (GS)[BRI 97]. This tool has a lot more functions to structure the group thinking.

•Brainstorming - whiteboard or pages for diverging, generating ideas

•Categorizer and outliner For structuring ideas by categorizing/merging/grouping

•Alternative analyzer – for grading alternatives based on pre set criteria

•Vote and survey- measure consensus, evaluate ideas

•Briefcase – a place to store all information to form a group memory

It is clear the all these function together can potentially provide a lot more support to the process then Netmeeting. All our requirements from the previous chapter on diverging are met; anonymous and parallel submission in an unstructured fashion is possible. During idea generation large amounts of ideas can be generated per minute and therefore it’s good that the application also supports categorisation and outlining, to put ideas in to structures and play with the structure (i.e. merging, mixing, grouping). For the selection of ideas the alternative analyzer can be very useful to measure the idea on preset criteria.

On the other hand there are also several problems with this package. During brainstorming there can be chosen for a separate page per participant or one ‘big page for all’ that can be edited concurrently. In the first case pages can be exchanged between participants like a paper, the participant can then continue on the list he/she received. The other option is to randomly send single ideas to another participant. Although neither of both approaches have problems with output production blocking the single shared big page can cause input blocking that increases over time because participants have more ideas to read, also the page can pretty full in a short time. The ‘page per person’ approach has less input blocking problems, on the other hand at some point the individual lists have to be combined into one (for grouping/combining/evaluating ideas. Remember our discussion about the limited amount of ‘human RAM’. How can the group combine all these pages without grouping per page, and thereby losing detail and maybe combination options!

Exchanging the pages may also cause a lot of reading work when the lists get longer, so it might be a better idea at some moment to swap to the randomly send a few ideas around to some participants every minute. We’ll come back to this in a moment.

Another problem is in structuring the problems or ideas that happens in two phases: the problem analysis and (re)definition phase and structuring the ideas after the brainstorm(s). The application only supports outline or mindmap structure to structure the ideas or concept groups. A hierarchical structure has some nice properties; it is for instance possible to ‘zoom out’ by closing all level n sub branches. Also editing a tree structure can be very fast and easy because links can be automatically laid (between a sub branch and its master branch). For instance it’s possible to drag a whole branch with items into another branch. The problem a tree has it that is structure is always ‘1 to many, 1 to many, etc’ around 1 central topic. In the problem analysis phase when you are analysing the problem clew, you are searching for the central problem, so you do not know it yet. Our hypothesis is that in practice you’ll then bump in the problem of being unable to make links between branches

or moving a branch into the centre.

Figure 4 Strict hierarchical nature of a mindmap

Although this last problem can be solved by extending the software or combining tools, the problems we saw before can’t be solved this way. A computer can’t detect why suddenly the flow of ideas stopped. Is the group having a discussion or did someone spoil the atmosphere by burning down an idea? Although some creative sessions, for instance with more then 50 people might only be possible with the use of a computer, in all cases a session leader will be needed. We see a session leader as a sort of choirmaster that uses the tools when appropriate. Coming back to the input blocking problem with GS earlier in this chapter, the session leader can at a certain moment chose to swap form ‘page swapping’ to ‘idea swapping’ if the list on a page gets to long. The biggest secret behind these software packages is that functions they support are often based on techniques that have been around before computers were here[MAJ 88], so a experienced session leader will know the pros and cons of each technique and how to handle them. For instance the page swapping is GS is mostly called ‘brainwriting’ or ‘6-3-5 method’ in literature and handbooks. A classical handbook is written by Majaro in 1988 [MAJ 88], he describes al major techniques and classifies them into 6 main categories named: metaphorical analogy, trigger sessions, wildest idea sessions and morphological analysis.

So should a session leader combine the instruments he likes best in his symphony? We argue that it will not get an optimal result. We’ve learned from integrated ERP systems that we can gain quite a bit if information is shared along the line instead of all departments using their own IT system that prints a form that goes to the next department, where all the information is entered again. The same goes for the phases or creative problem solving. Along the line we use multiple techniques to generate and select ideas. So maybe the biggest challenge for groupware for support of creative problem solving is not only to support all phases and several techniques but to integrate them.

In this final chapter we’ve seen how a special breed of groupware can help groups overcome barriers in creative problem solving and improve their productivity. We also saw that creative problem solving is always more then the using the groupware. We also talked shortly about issues like session leadership, group size and physical layout that contribute to a creative session no matter what software is used.

9. CONCLUSION

In this paper we saw that creative problem plays an important role in innovation. Creative problem solving is a typical group activity that goes in one direction through 5 phases (warmingup, Problem analysis, Diverging, converging, selection). Several authors laid down the ground rules and we saw some common techniques. We then looked at how two groupware tools take these notions into account and where improvements are possible. The problems we found, from a theoretical perspective, can be subject for future research.

For me personally this has been my first real research assignment based on a research proposal followed by a self determined path through literature. I’ve learned a lot about doing scientific research by discussing some articles in the lecture and reading a large number of articles on my own. Although we all lacked a specific course on the theme, and it’s a bit a sidetrack from the main interest of my study I’m very satisfied with the results produced within the timeframe. 10. REFERENCES

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