TOWARDS A MEASURE FOR ASSESSING CREATIVE INFLUENCES OF A CREATIVITY TECHNIQUE

Product innovation is central to the success of manufacturing industry. Creativity, the process by which novel and interesting ideas are created, plays a central role in innovation. One goal of design research is to understand the influences on and processes of design creativity, so that these can be inculcated and practiced by product developers to gain competitive advantage. Also, there is a variety of creativity techniques, but apart from few studies undertaken for a few well-known techniques, most have only anecdotal evidence of their worth and their exact influences on the creative problem solving process. In this paper, we do a survey of various theories of creativity and design problem solving in order to identify the main problem solving tasks and the main influences on creativity in the context of product development. Based on these, we develop a measure with which to assess the relevance and worth of a creativity technique, so that it can be used at appropriate stages of product development, and in appropriate combinations with other techniques in order to deliver the necessary outputs