Master's thesis Andreea Usatenco

Creativity is a key factor for innovation. Ideation (i.e. generating and developing ideas) is an important skill for complex problem solving. Thus, companies and organizations increasingly demand for creativity from their employees. Ideation software claims to promote the creativity of individuals and teams. However, there are various implementations and combinations of specific creativity techniques and innovation processes. There is a broad range of approaches to ideation support. As a consequence, it is challenging to compare different ideation tools and to evaluate how specific tools fit into an organization’s context (i.e. goals, culture etc.). The goal of this thesis is to review the current market in ideation software, categorize available tools according to their featureset and conduct an experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of ideation software empirically. An experimental design will be developed to compare creativity workshops without software support to software supported creativity sessions.

The research questions of this thesis are:

1. Which categories of ideation tools are available in the market?

2. Which principles from psychology influenced the design of those tools?

3. How does ideation software impact the idea generation within teams (in terms of quality and quantity)? (Experiment:guided workshop vs. ideation software type 1 vs. ideation software type 2)