Changing the Perspective: Improving Generate thinkLets for Ideation

Creativity techniques provide a variety of approaches for supporting an ideation process. These techniques can be executed using a Group Support System (GSS), thus allowing the ideation process to be distributed across geographical distances. However, experience is necessary for the selection of an appropriate creativity technique, its implementation in a GSS, and the facilitation during the ideation process itself. To tackle these problems, 101 creativity techniques were analysed with respect to their underlying cognitive processes. The results show that there are only three cognitive principles that stimulate the ideation process by providing a change of perspective. Change of perspective can be used to formalize the cognitive process of creativity techniques. The paper shows how this change of perspective can be used to implement an ideation process with a GSS via Generate thinkLets and discuss how this formalisation can improve the applicability of GSS for ideation processes.