Generating new ideas is exceedingly important in today’s rapidly changing environment. Although n... more Generating new ideas is exceedingly important in today’s rapidly changing environment. Although numerous academic institutes provide workshop programs to generate innovative ideas, little theoretical or empirical research exists which investigates the thinking processes of idea generation for enhancing the appropriateness of ideas generated through workshop facilitation. This study reviewed existing models of creative process and found that incubation and deliberation process is crucial for generating a new idea. Thus, we propose a workshop process and effective tasks that encourage participants to generate appropriate ideas. We conducted two different types of workshops: with deliberation session and without it. As a result, we observed a slightly but statistically significant relationship between having a deliberation session and generating an appropriate idea. This paper proposes a workshop design method based on theoretical and empirical supports to enhance thinking skills of participants in new idea generation.
Knowledge plays a more important role in promoting entrepreneurship in the current information-le... more Knowledge plays a more important role in promoting entrepreneurship in the current information-led society than it did during the age of industrialization. Many recent studies found that entrepreneurship stimulates and generates innovation and economic growth. In response to the issues of long-term low growth, the Japa-nese government implemented several policies to encourage universities initiate entrepreneurial activities. This paper examines Japanese policies since 2014 that support universities in providing various programs for developing global entrepreneurs. Thirteen academic institutes were beneficiaries of three-year funding since the fiscal year of 2014. Each university designed its own educational programs according to their own contexts, built various forms of innovation ecosystems with domestic as well as international partner organizations , and offered entrepreneurship training courses or innovation workshops for companies to sustain its programs through broadening their funding bases. Due to the interdisciplinary nature and short history in operating the programs so far, it is difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of the programs. However, each participating university accumulated knowledge and experience while carrying out their various programs, suggesting important new directions for policymakers and education program designers in facilitating entre-preneurship and innovation.
Analogical thinking is one of the most effective tools to generate innovative ideas. It enables u... more Analogical thinking is one of the most effective tools to generate innovative ideas. It enables us to develop new ideas by transferring information from well-known domains and utilizing them in a novel domain. However, using analogical thinking does not always yield appropriate ideas, and there is a lack of consensus among researchers regarding the evaluation methods for assessing new ideas. Here, we define the appropriateness of generated ideas as having high structural and low superficial similarities with their source ideas. This study investigates the relationship between thinking process and the appropriateness of ideas generated through analogical thinking. We conducted four workshops with 22 students in order to collect the data. All generated ideas were assessed based on the definition of appropriateness in this study. The results show that participants who deliberate more before reaching the creative leap stage and those who are engaged in more trial and error for deciding the final domain of a new idea have a greater possibility of generating appropriate ideas. The findings suggest new strategies of designing workshops to enhance the appropriateness of new ideas.
Although there have been many educational programs focusing on the creation of new ideas, the ass... more Although there have been many educational programs focusing on the creation of new ideas, the assessment of novelty is still a controversial issue. As an ideation tool, analogical thinking enables conceptual change, which is seen as a crucial aspect of creativity. In this regard, the use of analogy can be an important instrument to facilitate novel idea generation. Analogies are generated by superficial or structural similarities from the memory. For creating a new idea by analogy, this study regards novelty as the domain-changing influenced by structural consistency with the source ideas. Consequently, we designed an assessment framework based on the latent semantic analysis of the domains and the consistency of the underlying mechanism between the source and the new ideas. Data was collected from the 14 subjects who participated in the workshop for this study. The workshop consists of three tasks: 1) Pre-task: All subjects were asked to read the 25 cases of the collective intelligence services, which is a business model creating value from large and loosely organized groups of people working together electronically e.g. Amazon.com, Google Japanese input; 2) Categorization task: Subjects were asked to categorize each case based on the underlying mechanism of the business through group discussion; 3) Generation task: Subjects were asked to create a new service idea individually using analogical thinking. As a result, 12 ideas were created, 6 of which were assessed as novel according to our assessment framework. Among the remaining 6 ideas, 4 were assessed as having high superficial similarity in terms of the idea domain, and 2 as having neither superficial nor structural similarity with the source ideas. Although our findings suggest that the proposed assessment framework for novelty evaluation is unable to provide a 'one-size fits-all method', it does enable us to overcome some of the limitations of current evaluation methods which depend on subjective judgements for rating.
Generating new ideas is exceedingly important in today’s rapidly changing environment. Although n... more Generating new ideas is exceedingly important in today’s rapidly changing environment. Although numerous academic institutes provide workshop programs to generate innovative ideas, little theoretical or empirical research exists which investigates the thinking processes of idea generation for enhancing the appropriateness of ideas generated through workshop facilitation. This study reviewed existing models of creative process and found that incubation and deliberation process is crucial for generating a new idea. Thus, we propose a workshop process and effective tasks that encourage participants to generate appropriate ideas. We conducted two different types of workshops: with deliberation session and without it. As a result, we observed a slightly but statistically significant relationship between having a deliberation session and generating an appropriate idea. This paper proposes a workshop design method based on theoretical and empirical supports to enhance thinking skills of participants in new idea generation.
Knowledge plays a more important role in promoting entrepreneurship in the current information-le... more Knowledge plays a more important role in promoting entrepreneurship in the current information-led society than it did during the age of industrialization. Many recent studies found that entrepreneurship stimulates and generates innovation and economic growth. In response to the issues of long-term low growth, the Japa-nese government implemented several policies to encourage universities initiate entrepreneurial activities. This paper examines Japanese policies since 2014 that support universities in providing various programs for developing global entrepreneurs. Thirteen academic institutes were beneficiaries of three-year funding since the fiscal year of 2014. Each university designed its own educational programs according to their own contexts, built various forms of innovation ecosystems with domestic as well as international partner organizations , and offered entrepreneurship training courses or innovation workshops for companies to sustain its programs through broadening their funding bases. Due to the interdisciplinary nature and short history in operating the programs so far, it is difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of the programs. However, each participating university accumulated knowledge and experience while carrying out their various programs, suggesting important new directions for policymakers and education program designers in facilitating entre-preneurship and innovation.
Analogical thinking is one of the most effective tools to generate innovative ideas. It enables u... more Analogical thinking is one of the most effective tools to generate innovative ideas. It enables us to develop new ideas by transferring information from well-known domains and utilizing them in a novel domain. However, using analogical thinking does not always yield appropriate ideas, and there is a lack of consensus among researchers regarding the evaluation methods for assessing new ideas. Here, we define the appropriateness of generated ideas as having high structural and low superficial similarities with their source ideas. This study investigates the relationship between thinking process and the appropriateness of ideas generated through analogical thinking. We conducted four workshops with 22 students in order to collect the data. All generated ideas were assessed based on the definition of appropriateness in this study. The results show that participants who deliberate more before reaching the creative leap stage and those who are engaged in more trial and error for deciding the final domain of a new idea have a greater possibility of generating appropriate ideas. The findings suggest new strategies of designing workshops to enhance the appropriateness of new ideas.
Although there have been many educational programs focusing on the creation of new ideas, the ass... more Although there have been many educational programs focusing on the creation of new ideas, the assessment of novelty is still a controversial issue. As an ideation tool, analogical thinking enables conceptual change, which is seen as a crucial aspect of creativity. In this regard, the use of analogy can be an important instrument to facilitate novel idea generation. Analogies are generated by superficial or structural similarities from the memory. For creating a new idea by analogy, this study regards novelty as the domain-changing influenced by structural consistency with the source ideas. Consequently, we designed an assessment framework based on the latent semantic analysis of the domains and the consistency of the underlying mechanism between the source and the new ideas. Data was collected from the 14 subjects who participated in the workshop for this study. The workshop consists of three tasks: 1) Pre-task: All subjects were asked to read the 25 cases of the collective intelligence services, which is a business model creating value from large and loosely organized groups of people working together electronically e.g. Amazon.com, Google Japanese input; 2) Categorization task: Subjects were asked to categorize each case based on the underlying mechanism of the business through group discussion; 3) Generation task: Subjects were asked to create a new service idea individually using analogical thinking. As a result, 12 ideas were created, 6 of which were assessed as novel according to our assessment framework. Among the remaining 6 ideas, 4 were assessed as having high superficial similarity in terms of the idea domain, and 2 as having neither superficial nor structural similarity with the source ideas. Although our findings suggest that the proposed assessment framework for novelty evaluation is unable to provide a 'one-size fits-all method', it does enable us to overcome some of the limitations of current evaluation methods which depend on subjective judgements for rating.
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