Towards Individual Innovation Capability: The Assessment of Idea Generating Methods and Creativity in a Capstone Design Course

Innovation is per se based not only on the individual problem solving, but the process from new ideas to commercialization of new products. However, in a time with rapid technology shifts and frequently altered customer requirements, creativity and more precisely the lack of useful new ideas surfacing is viewed as problematic by companies. Ways of involving creativity has been to apply idea generating (IG) methods for identification of creativity sources. This paper consists of a combined theoretical and empirical approach which aims at studying existing tests and proposing suitable creative methods to be used in higher engineering education. The authors work with an extensive capstone design course in Integrated Product Development that emphasizes systematic and parallel approaches to product development. In contrast to traditional modes and styles of teaching that make few attempts to encourage students to pursue a variety of IG methods the capstone design course in integrated product development puts a large part of the responsibility on the students. In all cases IG and use of creativity methods is a natural ingredient. Thus, students’ self-regulation and insights into how to work with methods and exercises is particularly interesting as this may have an affect on managing their creative skill. Overall possible improvements in students’ creative potential transcend interesting notions on capability to innovate. Thus, this paper’s purpose is to investigate whether creativity as an ingredient of a student’s innovation capability is influenced by using IG methods. And whether the selections made by project groups are aligned to best utilize students’ creative thinking.