Creativity Support at the Workplace

Abstract: In this paper, we discuss creativity as a form of learning from the perspective of idea generation in the creative process. We analyze forms of creativity and present the statement-based creativity techniques. Based on these concepts a tool prototype IdeaTrigger is presented and verified. It shows the advantages for innovative activity, especially in collaborative environment. 1 Creative Work and Creativity Support Creativity can be seen as the hallmark of intelligent work. As Europe’s future is seen as a knowledge economy [KE09], intelligent and creative work will become increasingly important. While sometimes creativity is seen mostly in the context of the Arts, we see creativity as a general phenomenon, which is relevant to each and every kind of complex problem solving [Bod04]. From this perspective, creativity is treated as a process to find solutions, which is also referred to innovative activity and involves both idea generation and idea management. As idea generation is an activity to retrieve existing knowledge from memory and to combine them into novel ones, it can be regarded as a form of learning in the sense of psychological activity. People acquire new knowledge, not by being taught or by acquiring in other ways existing knowledge, but rather they develop this knowledge anew, as it does not exist yet. Creativity is by definition hardly predictable, thus supporting it effectively is very difficult. In this paper, we will describe an approach towards integrating domain-independent creativity support effectively in a workplace environment. As creativity support we will regard any kind of methodological or IT support that enables people to be more creative, both in terms of quality and quantity of their ideas. Our approach relies on established creativity techniques, integrates several techniques and aims to automatize as much as possible of the information handling. The work, w