Idea Market: Implementing an ideation guide for product design education and innovation
Year: 2012
Editor: Lyndon Buck, Geert Frateur, William Ion, Chris McMahon, Chris Baelus, Guido De Grande, Stijn Verwulgen
Author: Dewit, Ivo; Du Bois, Els; Moons, Ingrid; Jacoby, Alexis
Series: E&PDE
Institution: Artesis University College Antwerp, Belgium
Section: Ideas to Market in Design Education
Page(s): 763-768
ISBN: 978-1-904670-36-0
Abstract
As current design students will be potential moderators for future design ideation sessions, the research focused on an ideation guide to support them in executing these sessions. Nowadays mapping the number of tools onto the logic of the innovation process gives an overload of possibilities and reveals the following important difficulties: (i) which tools should be used in each specific situation, and (ii) how to implement the possible tools in the right manner. This research also focuses on the success factors and the conditions to deploy supporting tools in a given innovation process in order to obtain a higher success rate in generating ideas and obtaining the necessary buy-in for it. The arguments are based on literature research and a series of five workshops with experts from academia and industry. In the first part of the paper, the key problems in the use and implementation are brought to light. The second part of the paper focuses on possible solutions for these key problems and results in a moderator guide supporting the ideation process. We hypothesize that design students will be more effective and efficient in creating output with an ideation session supported by the Idea2Market guiding box. The third part of the paper gives evidence of the possibilities of the Idea2Market instruction manual; by describing a test with students. The output of the students supported by the instructions was clearly higher than the results of a control group which was not supported by specific instructions.
Keywords: Innovation process, product design, ideation and moderator support