Abstract
The New Product Development phase gate process spans from strategic planning through commercialization. A key to successful products is a strong conceptual phase wherein ideas are generated, and feasibility is measured. Expansive exploration of the design space, or variety, during ideation is an important part of an innovative conceptual phase. For over a decade, principal researchers at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (Associate Professor Katja Hölttä-Otto, Associate Professor Trina Kershaw, Professor Sankha Bhowmick) collected nearly 1,000 student sketches in order to measure creativity during ideation via originality, fixation, and variety scores.In our experiment, 228 freshman and 163 senior mechanical engineering students sketched concepts for the next generation of trash collectors with and without a physical example. Students had low fixation scores if they did not use the example. Fixation was also reduced within example groups due to higher curriculum level from freshman to senior year. Not surprisingly, lower fixation yields higher originality scores. However, concepts generated without example still showed low originality and were often designed based off common products available in the market. Variety was highest among seniors with no example and lowest among freshman with an example. The provided example reduces variety by focusing students on adapting the details of one particular principle rather than allowing them to deviate to other principles. However, no example student variety is still restricted by known solutions such that students adapt the details of common products. This finding furthers our understanding for why no example solutions can still have low originality despite low fixation scores. This work seeks to make product engineers conscious of the potential biases that can affect originality. Additionally, it is clear that time spent analyzing the results of an ideation activity can illuminate subtle blocks in the innovative process.