Reuse of ideas and concepts for creative stimuli in engineering design

Abstract

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.