Observation of a Highly Innovative Group – Directions for Future Research

DS 86: Proceedings of The Fourth International Conference on Design Creativity,Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

Year: 2016
Editor: Julie Linsey, Maria Yang, and Yukari Nagai
Author: Julie, Linsey; Randii, Wessen; John, Ziemer
Series: ICDC
ISBN: 978-1-904670-82-7

Abstract

Within NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Architecture-Team (A-Team) facilitates group sessions focused on very early conceptual design. The A-Team contains expertise in tools, methods, and systems engineering processes. These sessions were observed, and consistency between the A-Team process and best practices within the literature were identified. A surprisingly short amount of time spent on idea generation was observed indicating that the controlled lab studies of idea generation likely have greater validity and usefulness than previously thought. Critical areas that have not received research attention were also identified. This includes effects of knowledge distribution, ideal group size, conceptual development over long time periods, training facilitators and how they affect the process, and other areas. Much more work needs to be done on other highly innovative groups to ascertain if the observations in this work transfer to new situations and to identify additional factors that demand further study.

Keywords: concept generation, conceptual design, systems engineering