Why is there a demand for consultants and outside directors? That is because what they are asked for objective advice and the clue—this chapter describes them as external activate factors—is precious. This chapter focuses on how the external activate factor affects human creativity, especially the process of creating new products or services, and the author conducted an experiment to compare the effect of external activate factors at a lecture of graduate school. As a result, when the external activate factor is provided, the emergence of abduction and new rules was observed, and the effect of storytelling was confirmed. Further research is to find what kind of external activate factor is preferable.
TopIntroduction
The describing of decisions made by a human being is often influenced by others (Asch, 1951). To drive innovation, IBM embedded a mechanism called FOAK, or First of A Kind (Frederich & Andrews, 2009), which is an innovative process to swiftly bridge technology to the market. In other words, it can be said to be a mechanism for developing the first service to be put in the market while exclusively collaborating with a specific external client for a specified period. The mechanism allows IBM to attain first-hand data from the client, and the client can also enjoy the upfront gains of the new service in the market. Furthermore, both IBM and clients can cooperate in terms of marketing strategies for a certain period of time. The author notes that IBM not only behaves individually as a leader in research but also employs the FOAK mechanism, which incorporates external input from the client in the innovation process. From this viewpoint, the author has focused interest in the effect of external inputs on creative activities and innovation.
A creativity support system is crucial for innovation. Finke et al. (1992) suggests that such a support system is important so as to be able to rearrange components and rejoin existing shapes and concepts in order to explore new concepts, thus demonstrating that the Geneplore model could lead to the restructuring of discoveries (Finke et al., 1992). Also, the further the distance between two concepts is, the more effective would be the creativity in a concept that has been formed by the combining of concepts (Klahr & Dunbar, 1988; Wilkenfeld & Ward, 2001; Taura et al., 2005). Some studies found that creativity can be triggered by ambiguous ideas (Gaver et al., 2003) and accordingly examined external restricting conditions that motivate creativity (Bonnardel, 2000). An occupation of subjects in these articles was, however, nothing by design so that the topic of the effects of external input in the process of creating new ideas of products or services with storytelling would be ignored.
Given the above, the author sets the research question of this article as follows:
How external activate factors serving as a clue affect an individual’s way of thinking when dealing with ill-defined creative ideas, including concept design with the storytelling?
The next section covers the concept creation model and the logic behind the analysis tool, followed by the analytical method. The outcome of the analysis is discussed, and the conclusion is presented next.