Future ideation : creating ideas despite distance

Team-based innovation, which builds on the true collaboration and thinking together strategy are at the heart for most manufacturing companies today. This strategy builds on a multifunctional team to increase the innovation potential. Diversity builds up the multifunctionality within the team and is a prerequisite for coming up with new innovations. Efficient idea generation demands facilitation, one example is brainstorming, which is easily performed. However, brainstorming is often misused, as it is not applied properly. A successful brainstorm seems chaotic, team members use Post-It notes and/or a whiteboard to write and sketch down ideas. In engineering design, computer tools support many of the development team's tasks, but an interactive computer support for idea generation is not commonly used. Also, existing tools do not support the "physical" activities found in classical brainstorming, they are commonly based on the logics of documentation than actual facilitation of a creative process. The study in this paper is based on observations of design teams and the purpose is to set up and present a specification for an idea generation tool that is both facilitated and mimics the best aspects of physical brainstorming.Validerad; 2010; Bibliografisk uppgift: Workshop Proceedings of 9th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, Aix en Provance, 18.05.2010 COOP 2010: Workshop on the mediation role of shared representation in cooperative activities: new challenges; 20100930 (ysko)Fastelaboratoriet - VINNEX