INTRODUCTION
As we enter the third millennium, organizations have to cope with accelerating rates of change in technology and increased levels of competition on a global scale more than ever before. In order to stay competitive within this changing business environment, organizations are forced to constantly pursue new strategies to differentiate themselves from their competition, such as offering a stream of new products and services (Satzinger et al., 1999). Furthermore, there is growing recognition that an organization’s capability to deal with change, improve services and quality, cut costs, develop new products, and compete in a global market will depend upon the level of creative and innovative thinking of its workforce (Covey, 1989). In short, in order to remain competitive in an era of increasing uncertainty and market globalization, organizations must constantly be creative and innovative with their products and services.
Software has been widely considered as central to all sophisticated innovations. In the age of the Internet the challenge is to identify and evaluate new ideas, processes and applications. In many of the fastest growing industries, including computer, entertainment, communications, advertising, logistics and finance, software has been the end product itself, or the highest value component in the end product. In other cases, software has been used to support value creation and innovation processes. The growing importance of software-based innovations suggests the need to improve the creative skills of IT professionals. This need, in turn, requires an appropriate response from the IT education and training sector. Moreover, IT education and training should better nurture students’ creativity, so that they can be successful in their future roles as innovative professionals and business people. It is particularly important that IT students be given an opportunity to develop and apply creative and innovative skills to software processes and products.
Given the crucial importance of creativity and innovativeness for success in a knowledge economy, the main purpose of this article is to explore concepts about creativity and how they relate to software development by providing empirical research examples in IT education.
CONCEPT OF CREATIVITY
The literature offers diverse conceptual definitions of creativity. Glass (2001) argues that creativity is hard to define, hard to judge and hard to quantize. Kappel and Rubenstein (1999) reason that this is due to fact that creativity is used to describe a variety of things; that is, supporting the creativity process, the creative person or the creative product present different requirements for the definition of the creativity. Tomas (1999), for example, defines creativity in terms of an original idea. Shalley and Perry-Smith (2001) point out that it is not enough to only be original; also, appropriateness is vital in order to distinguish creative ideas from surreal ideas that may be unique, but have unlawful or highly unrealistic implications.
Central to creativity is the ability to generate ideas. Some psychologists and philosophers have argued that idea formation can be explained by way of association (Mednick & Mednick, 1964). This theory suggests that association occurs when two stimuli take place together (contiguity), when two stimuli are similar to each other (similarity), or when two stimuli are different from each other (contrast). Associations may be stimulated by environmental factors, by previous associations, or may be mediated by ideas related to other associates. Therefore, it is possible to have many combinations and permutations. Associations can vary in strength, depending on how often associated ideas occur together or separately.
Lateral thinking is an aid to creativity when one needs to have diverse ideas. It is a function of knowledge and imagination that may bring out discovery, innovation, imagination, and exploration. Lateral thinking consists of seeking as many alternative options as possible to the extent of one’s adventurousness. In other words, it is a mental activity involving making connections between knowledge and ideas that were previously unrelated. The basis of lateral thinking is that since many problems require a different perspective to be solved successfully, individuals should suspend their judgment about what is relevant to a course of action.
CREATIVITY TECHNIQUES
Consistent with the view that creative thinking can be learnt by appropriate stimulation and instruction, a variety of formal techniques have been developed to assist the production of novel ideas including brainstorming, mind mapping or solo brainstorming. Brainstorming and similar idea generation techniques aim to increase the production of novel ideas. The objective is to promote creativity by appropriately managing interaction within group as well as enhancing the creative environment. The procedures involved in the following examples are not difficult and may involve “lateral thinking,” where ideas are stimulated by members of the group.
Brainstorming is an idea generation technique that was conceptualized by Walt Disney in the late 1920s and then expanded by Alex Osborn (1957). The objective of brainstorming is to encourage associations. The basic assumption is that it is possible for an individual(s) to generate many ideas, provided that he or she is exposed to stimuli and has experience, knowledge, and the personal flexibility to develop various permutations and combinations, and the capacity to make correct selections. This method initially emphasizes the quantity of ideas generated, leaving the assessment of quality to a later stage. Brainstorming sessions can be conducted electronically or verbally. In electronic brainstorming systems (EBS), group members share their knowledge and ideas by sending their ideas to each other, and by viewing the ideas of other members. Ideas generated from a brainstorming session can be recorded and stored in electronic files, making them easily accessible for printing or later reference (Nunamaker et al., 1991).
Another free association technique is mind mapping. This method begins with writing down a main idea in the centre of the page, and then working outward in all directions, producing a growing and organized structure composed of key words and key images, as illustrated in Figure 1. Mind mapping therefore relies on association (and clustering) of concepts/issues. The association process underling construction of the mind map actually facilitates making connections between concepts, and hence tends to generate new ideas and associations that have not been thought of before.
An example of an individual creativity technique is solo brainstorming (SBS), originally proposed by Aurum (1997). This technique is especially suited to environments where sentential analysis is appropriate, or information sources are document-based (e.g., reports, abstracts). SBS requires the individuals to adhere to a formal protocol, where a series of documents are examined and then edited. The ultimate aim in an SBS session is to determine a sufficient set of issues. As applications of the SBS protocol have been computer-based, all issues are automatically available in electronic form for further analysis. The SBS protocol touches upon an important research issue in the area of knowledge management: whether an increase in an individual’s level of domain knowledge will necessarily increase their capacity to be creative within that domain. Central to the SBS protocol is the encouragement of participants to use their cognitive abilities by asking them to make “lateral comments”.
Figure 1. Mind mapping
CREATIVITY IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Software engineering is another domain in which creativity plays an important role. The value of creativity is also well recognised in the field of system requirements determination. Robertson (2001) addresses requirements determination as “requirements discovery,” which suggests that many users may not even be aware of their true requirements (e.g., unconscious requirements) without application of techniques for reflection and creativity.
In an experiment focusing upon requirements elicitation, Aurum and Martin (1999) applied the SBS protocol to determine whether application of the protocol would deliver a richer set of requirement statements and insights. An experiment was conducted in which participants were told to adopt the role of a systems analyst retained by a fictitious organization, The Cultural Heritage Authority (CHA), to write requirements specification for their main information systems. The types of documents used as input (external information) to this study included fictitious interviews with users and abstracts from published articles addressing either heritage or marketing issues. Participants’ task was to generate ideas and identify issues to be included in CHA’s software requirements specification (SRS).
The objective of the research was to investigate whether the application of the SBS protocol had indeed led to a richer level of requirement specifications. The following two research questions are investigated (a) whether application of the protocol would result in identification of more relevant, workable, and original requirements issues, (b) to measure the lateral thinking by examining the linguistic behavior of participants.
The main findings of this study indicated that an SBS-based learning tool had a positive effect on participants’ creative performances in development of SRS. This outcome was evident in the originality aspect of task performance, but not relevance and workability. Users were found to generate significantly more original ideas as the result of their interaction with the tool, while maintaining similar levels of relevance and workability (Aurum et al., 2003).
Aurum (1997) suggests that the level of “laterality” for any thought for a given problem can only be assessed with respect to the thoughts generated by others for the same problem. Aurum also found that documents generated from SBS session exhibited some unique characteristics. From linguistic analysis, it was possible to identify those users who were able to think laterally in the SBS session. Furthermore, lateral thinkers displayed a more complex linguistic pattern than non-lateral thinkers, as illustrated in Figure 2. Participants who generated many ideas and identified many issues were also found to be the lateral thinkers. The findings showed that lateral thinkers wrote many “issue loaded” or “idea loaded” sentences, whereas non-lateral thinkers produced fewer ideas. However, the distinction between these two groups was not clear-cut, but rather a continuum.
Figure 2. Linguistic behavior of SBS participants
The results of this study indicate that the SBS is a promising method for stimulating creative thinking and idea generation in a software development task. Essentially, the brainstorming session helped students uncover ideas without being constrained, stimulate their own thinking by external influences, and capture their thoughts.
These findings also have some important implications for software development and IT education. They demonstrate that creativity can be improved, leading to higher quality software designs. The findings also suggest that the type of tool tested here may be a useful teaching tool in a variety of IT courses involving creative thinking and problem solving. Furthermore, the tool is likely to be most valuable in situations where the problem is unstructured, goals indistinct, and where the outcome of an action cannot always be clearly identified. The tool is a relatively generic one, since it uses a technique that can be applied to a variety of scenarios and can help people process relevant documents whilst identifying issues. These documents act like a ‘trigger to stimulate domain-specific ideas from users.
CONCLUSION
Many organizations have come to realize that the creativity of their management and employees is an important source for competitive advantage. However, arguably more can be done within these organizations to promote a creative culture – for example, more organizations should seek to reward management and employees for creative (or divergent) displays, and make creativity supporting technologies more readily available to them.
A number of techniques have been developed to facilitate creativity, with many techniques based upon some form of brainstorming. One theme common to some of the more recent studies on creativity is the importance of a rich source of stimuli to support the creative process, whether the stimuli are: documents, as in Aurum and Martin (1999); group memory, as in Satzinger et al. (1999); or models, as in Shalley and Perry-Smith (2001). Other forms of stimuli include: text, audio, graphics, simulations, video, and so forth (Kletke et al., 2001). Indeed, the effectiveness of the brainstorming technique relies on participants being stimulated by the ideas contributed by others. The potential to cascade ideas is referred to as synergy (Dennis & Valacich, 1993) – that is, the ability of an idea from one participant to trigger in another participant a new idea that would otherwise not have been produced. Another technique is formalizing the creative process through some protocol that can be an effective strategy in terms of supporting the level of intrinsic motivation and mental effort required by participants undertaking a creativity task (Aurum 1999; Paulus & Yang, 2000). Application of a formal protocol is usually at the heart of a creativity technique, and ensures a more systematic and thorough approach to information analysis, which is essential for many creativity tasks.
KEY TERMS
Creativity: There are many views about the definition of creativity. In the context of discovery, creativity is the ability to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives that might be useful solving problems. There are several aspects of creativity, including creative product or value, creative person/people, creative environment, creative symbols and creative process.
Electronic Brainstorming Systems (EBS): A computer-based system that facilitates brainstorming between group members.
Information System (IS): A system that uses IT to capture, transmit, store, retrieve, manipulate or display data for business processes in an organization.
Information Technology (IT): Computer hardware and software, as well as the peripheral devices closely associated with computer-based systems that facilitate data processing tasks, such as capturing, transmitting, storing, retrieving, manipulating or displaying data. IT includes matters concerned with design, development, and implementation of information systems and applications.
Internet: A worldwide network of computer networks that use the TCP/IP network protocols to facilitate data transmission. It provides access to a vast amount of information resources including multimedia (movies, sound, and images), software, text documents, news articles, electronic journal, travel information and so forth. It also provides an environment for buying and selling products and services over a network.
Knowledge Economy: Economic growth is driven by the accumulation of knowledge, which is the basic form of capital. A knowledge driven economy is one in which the generation and exploitation of knowledge plays the predominant part in the creation of wealth.
Knowledge Management (KM): The collection of processes that manage the creation, dissemination, and utilization of knowledge for learning, problem solving, and decision-making. KM often encompasses identifying intellectual assets within organizations. The management of knowledge is regarded as a main source of competitive advantage for organizations. KM brings together three organizational resources: people, process and technologies, and enables the organization to use and share information more effectively
Software Requirements Specification: A document that contains all requirements, for example functional and non-functional requirements and project issues, of the system as agreed upon by customers and software developers.
