Alex Gabriel

Semantic Approach to Analyze Creativity Corpus

Creativity is defined as the way to define something new and original. The creativity is the first step of the innovation process. Indeed, the innovation process is based on a first idea. During creativity workshops, engineers work together in a collaborative way to generate new ideas. They follow the creativity process based on different phases: discover the topic, apply the creativity methods, generate ideas, formalize ideas, share and evaluate their ideas, then select the innovative ones. Up till now, the creativity workshops used simple tools like paperboards, post-its or idea sheets to capture ideas. These tools are not efficient in regrouping the ideas and categorizing them into clusters defined by some themes. In this paper we describe a Natural Language Processing based system that helps participants in creativity workshops to cluster and classify their ideas.

Conceptual Framework of an Intelligent System to Support Creative Workshops

In today’s highly competitive economic context, companies are forced to be innovative in order to stay on track. This mandate to innovate requires companies to set up various tools to evaluate the capacity to innovate and implement innovative dynamics. Before purporting to generate innovation, we need ideas. Thus, creativity is in some way the upstream component of innovation. Creativity implies the production of ideas. This production of ideas can be supported by many techniques that can be classified into two categories: systematic and structured methods (TRIZ) and explorative approaches (brainstorming, mind mapping, personas, affinity diagram, etc.). The fact is that these creative techniques can be necessary but are not enough to produce unobvious ideas. The many factors that influence the creation of a creative dynamic lead to a complex situation which is difficult to manage optimally. From among the various ways to establish a creative dynamic in organisations, this work considers the creative workshop, which is a collaborative way of solving problems by maximising the proposition of unusual ideas. In this chapter, we will discuss the need to structure activities before, during and after the workshop itself and how a support system could allow an optimal organisation of the workshop throughout the entire creative process. The components of the creative support system will be described and the potential impacts on the creativity process discussed.

Ontology to Represent the Knowledge Domain of a Creative Workshop

Creativity is a critical factor in the todays increasingly competitive business environment. In order to increase and accelerate the production of innovation, firms attempt to promote creativity and produce ideas by organizing creative workshops. The creative process, especially during creative workshop, is a knowledge creation and manipulation process. Despite creative production is unpredictable, there is key knowledge that is expected and required to implement a creative workshop and a creative dynamic. In a context of increasing use of groupware by team during creative problem solving, the identification of this knowledge is very important to provide assistance during the process. A literature review of creative support systems highlights some limitation in assisting the entire creative process, formalizing this area of knowledge related to creative workshop lead to large amounts of perspectives for the creation of intelligent creative support system. The present article suggests the use of an organizational approach to explicit the area of knowledge and use it for the creation of the creative workshop management ontology.

Multi-agent System to Support Creative Workshop

The creative workshops (creative jam or design jam) are an increasingly used way to produce innovation avenue in a short time. Due to the increasing popularity in company and organization, it is subject to computer assistance to increase productivity, and information capitalization. The actual digital systems are limited in supporting the complex process of creative workshops. The actual papers propose to apply the multi-agent system approach and more specifically an organizational approach to design a creative support system that will cover the entire complexity of the creative workshop.

Process modelling for a creative problem solving support system

More and more digital supports are being developed to assist creativity. Some of them are designed to uniquely support specific creative methods, while others target the overall support of the creativity and innovation process. Whatever they might offer, only a few use a systems engineering approach. Generally, they do not formalize the environment or interactions within it. The present study proposes a new formalism for modelling the creativity process through the design of a Creative Support System (CSS). This formalism attempts to model an Innovation Challenge and is inspired by actual system engineering modelling formalisms and the literature on creativity. The first section will discuss CSS support of the “48h to Generate Ideas®” creativity challenge. Following this, the new representation formalism will be discussed. The conclusion will focus on the application of this formalism and establishment of the basis for future research.