Facilitating Creativity and Shared Understanding in Design Teams

We investigated team interaction arrive at a shared understanding of the task and at fresh, creative ideas in 20 meetings in different types of industry. The patterns are iterative in terms of team communication though structural approaches were seen as beneficial in interviews. These observations were utilised to design a computer-based environment for early stages of product innovation. In two experiments with students, we compared the new tool against paper-based and non-facilitated groups and different creativity techniques. The results show that for simple tasks, different techniques are equally appropriate.