The Impact of Stimuli Characteristics on the Ideation Process: An Evaluation of the Change of Perspective 'Analogy'

Idea generation techniques provide a variety of approaches for supporting an innovation process. Until recently, the space of techniques has been unstructured, and no clear guidelines have been available for the selection of an appropriate technique for a given innovation goal. We used the 'change of perspective' paradigm as an approach to study idea generation techniques with the aim of obtaining more structured and rigorous guidelines for generating ideas. This paper reports the results of an experiment that analysed the influence of the external stimuli characteristics on the idea generation. We introduce a new approach to characterise external stimuli for the change of perspective 'analogy' by using the criteria 'typical' and 'relevant'. Twenty-two people used the change of perspective 'analogy' in an ideation workshop with a set of different external stimuli. The result supports our assumption that the characteristic of an external stimulus affect the generation of ideas.