Questionnaire-Based Investigation of Preferences in Idea Evaluation Depending on Educational Backgrounds

Abstract

It is a key competence of companies to develop innovative products. Those products are developed by a team of people from diversified backgrounds. However, merely forming a multidisciplinary team does not directly link to a higher degree of creativity of outcome. The degree of creativity of outcome is largely contributed by early phase of design projects, namely concept development. It can be further divided into divergence (such as idea generation) and convergence (such as evaluation and selection of concept). Although creative ideas should be selected during the convergence process, factors influencing successful concept selection are still unknown. Therefore, it is of importance to support multidisciplinary teams in concept developments, especially on concept selections. We hypothesize that people prefer specific aspect of ideas depending on their discipline. This paper focuses on the development of a questionnaire and clarify differences in the choice of ideas between arts and engineering students. The developed questionnaire has eight pairs of ideas, each of which has an idea having a significantly higher degree of feasibility but a lower degree of novelty (feasible idea) and the other idea has vice versa (novel idea). Participants are asked to choose one good idea from each pair. The questionnaire was responded by both fifteen engineering and art students. The result suggests that there might be more similarity than significant differences in the preference of creativity due to educational backgrounds. The results also imply that the novelty aspect tends to get fewer attentions while usefulness gets much attention. This paper offers findings in factors of individual idea selections.