Context:

Collaborative Ideation is an interdisciplinary field, using insights from computer science (2), psychology (6) and social science (3). It focuses on the process of using groups of people (crowds) for the generation of ideas in a distributed setting (for example in open innovation processes). Related work investigates how to increase data quality (1) or creativity of ideas (2).

Problem:

Previous approaches of using a large number of people to create ideas showed that while crowds are able to match product development experts in quality of ideas (3), the output data from those approaches often consists of a large quantity of ideas that are

a) Simple b) Mundane c) Repetitive (4)

We think these three limitations could be tackled by building a system, that let's users collaborative with a fixed set of features, inspired by github interactions (star, fork, merge, comment, watch). Alternatively, the collaboration features could be inspired by a brainstorming-ontology (e.g. BSIOC (5))

Objectives:

The goal of this work is to build a system, that enables users to collaborate in a brainstorming process, and to test the impact of enabling/disabling these collaborative features on the quantity, elaboration and creativity of the generated ideas. The system will be tested by using Crowdworker studies (e.g. amazon mechanical turk).

References

(1) Girotto, Victor, Erin Walker, and Winslow Burleson. "The Effect of Peripheral Micro-tasks on Crowd Ideation." Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2017.

(2) Siangliulue, Pao, Joel Chan, Steven P. Dow, and Krzysztof Z. Gajos. “IdeaHound: Improving Large-Scale Collaborative Ideation with Crowd-Powered Real-Time Semantic Modeling.” In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, 609–624. UIST ’16. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2016.

(3) Wagenknecht, Thomas, et al. "Ideate. Collaborate. Repeat. A Research Agenda for Idea Generation, Collaboration and Evaluation in Open Innovation." (2017).

(4) Bjelland, Osvald M., and Robert Chapman Wood. "An inside view of IBM's' Innovation Jam'." MIT Sloan management review50.1 (2008): 32.

(5) Dell’Angelo, Luca, et al. "A Semantic Web Vocabulary Supporting Brainstorming for Research Communities." World Summit on Knowledge Society. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011.

(6) Nijstad, Bernard A., Wolfgang Stroebe, and Hein FM Lodewijkx. "Cognitive stimulation and interference in groups: Exposure effects in an idea generation task." Journal of experimental social psychology 38.6 (2002): 535-544.