Facilitating the Survival and Development of Novel Ideas in Collaborative Innovation
Abstract
The proposed project is a collaborative effort among computer scientists, social psychologists, and a cognitive psychologist to test a model of enhancing collaborative ideation and decision-making. Although there is now an extensive knowledge base on factors related to enhanced creativity and innovation in different contexts, very little is known about the links among the various phases of the collaborative innovation processÑideation, elaboration, evaluation, selection, and development or implementation. One key question concerns getting the best ideas from the ideation session to survive into the idea selection and development phase. There are a number of reasons why they do not, and this project seeks to use computer-assisted feedback to help overcome the barriers to such idea survival, and to enhance the likelihood of the best ideas being carried forward and developed. The first scientific objective of the project is to test a theoretical model that proposes key factors linking the various stages of the innovation process. This will be done using human participants in laboratory experiments. Groups will engage in tasks under various experimental conditions, and theoretically-derived processes and outcomes will be examined. The second scientific objective of the project is to develop a software tool with the capabilities to track the dynamics of ideation over time; evaluate the ideas proposed during the creative process in terms of their topics, relevance, and novelty; provide visualization of the ideation process as trajectories in the semantic space; and provide real-time feedback to group members in the form of hints and suggested concepts using information about the task, and strategic alerts derived from the dynamics of the thought trajectories. The third scientific objective of the project is to test our theoretical model in conjunction with the software tool, such that groups working in ideation and decision-making tasks can use the computer system in real-time to enhance the quality of their group processes linking the ideation and decision phases. This multi-disciplinary collaboration has the potential for important new scientific advances because it pushes the theory, methodologies, and eventual knowledge about collaborative innovation in novel and rather significant ways, and does so by using computer-assisted real-time feedback.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jul 09, 2020
- Source ID
- W911NF2010213
Entities
People
- Jared B Kenworthy
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- United States Army
- University of Texas at Arlington