Collaborative, heuristic and normatively guided techniques to creativity

Societies and companies need innovations to advance and sustain long-term profitability. Innovations, on the other hand, need creativity, for which teams are typically utilized to take advantage of the multiple perspectives and divergent experience it could offer.This paper suggests the "collaborative, heuristic and normatively guided" techniques, which could be used to promote creativity in teams. They consist of (1) combining a multi-round Delphi technique with a series of thinking strategies (e.g., brain-storming, divide-and-conquer, deepsmart, etc,) that are to be applied by team members, (2) changing the level of abstractions to alter team members' perspectives, (3) guiding the collaborative idea creation process with customized questions to retain focus, and (4) pruning the multi-round outcomes to focus efforts on increasingly novel ideas. The principal advantages of these techniques lie in its capabilities of (1) processing a number of desirable rounds, (2) being self-directed and highly cost-effective, (3) invoking a multi-mode of thinking patterns, (4) assuring the outcomes being mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, (5) allowing busy knowledge workers to participate, (6) creating an internally competitive environment to induce creativity, and (7) applying readily in global settings absent of geographical and time-zone constraints. This set of techniques has seen limited testing in classroom settings so far. Preliminary results indicate that they appear to be quite useful in creating new ideas to improve existing products and services.