In today's economy, innovation is the key factor to remain competitive. However, due to the revolutionary and disruptive nature of innovations, it is apparent that traditional requirements engineering (RE) activities alone are not sufficient in this context (even though still highly important, of course). Rather, there is a strong need to enhance traditional RE activities with creativity techniques in a product or service development process. In the last seven years, we have supported several organizations from different domains in innovation finding during the RE phase. This paper presents our experiences from the creativity workshops we applied there, and it shows how such workshops can be integrated into RE processes. In this context, we list success factors that we observed and show the key ingredients of successful creativity workshops from our experience.
In today’s economy, innovation is the key factor to remain competitive. Without having real innovations that inspire and bind customers, almost every organization can easily be replaced by other organizations that provide the same services and products with higher quality or lower prices.
However, innovation may not be mixed up with novelty. Adding a new feature to an existing product is typically an evolution but seldom an innovation. Real innovations change the way how customers experience a product, service or task in a certain domain, or they change the insights people can gain through it. Innovations therefore enhance the status quo and enable new benefits that did not exist there before.
At least in projects in which there is the need to have disruptive ideas, external inspirations, or a creative involvement of different stakeholder groups, it is therefore apparent that traditional requirements engineering (RE) activities alone are not sufficient (even though still highly important, of course). This means that, in such a context, merely eliciting expectations and requirements from the stakeholders, or analyzing their problems and frustrations will probably not lead to a solution that is needed for changing this domain sustainably. The often cited statement from Henry Copyright © 2015 by the authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors. Ford, i.e., “if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” is therefore still valid today.
Thus, at least under the aforementioned circumstances, there is a strong need to
enhance traditional RE activities with creativity techniques in a product or service
development process. However, we claim that doing a brainstorming [
In the last seven years, we have supported several organizations from different domains in innovation finding during the RE phase. This paper presents our experiences from the creativity workshops we applied there, and it shows how such workshops can be integrated into RE processes. In this context, we argue that many things during such a workshop can go wrong if not carefully anticipated. Thus, we list the good and bad things we observed during our creativity workshops and we highlight the need for an excellent preparation, moderation and rework that we consider as indispensable for coming up with really beneficial results. Based on this, we also explain how the workshop results can be processed further in order to transfer initial ideas into concrete requirements.
As we have already presented a first set of 12 success factors at CREARE 2010
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The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In section II, we describe the
projects in which we did a creativity workshop during RE in the past and we
summarize their contexts and goals. In this context, we elaborate the success factors
of these workshops and also present a re-discussion of the factors presented in our
previous publication [
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New Success Factors
As the first new success factor, we consider having six key ingredients (participants’ roles) in each creativity workshop. First, an idea generator with a domain (not technical) perspective is needed to generate unusual ideas in the workshop. As a kind of pendant, we need as second role an idea evaluator with a technical perspective in order to estimate feasibility and needed effort for the evaluation phase. Third, we need an idea generator with a technical perspective to produce innovative ideas based on technical innovation potential. As a pendant for this person, we need as fourth role the idea evaluator with a domain perspective that can judge whether a technology-driven idea would be accepted by the domain and what would be the impact. The fifth and sixth role are the moderators of the workshop. Both moderators should be skilled in creativity techniques and also moderation. We differentiate the moderators in the analytical moderator and the motivating moderator. The motivating moderator continuously guides the participants through the workshop and motivates them to contribute actively. By his behavior he encourages the participants to contribute continuously to reduce their shyness. The analytical moderator keeps a close eye on the meta-level on the one side and the results of the creativity techniques on the other side. In case he or she realizes a problem on the meta-level (like participants getting into too intense discussions) or on the result level (output completely different than expected), the analytical moderator interrupts the workshop and re-plans the workshop in a coffee break.
A second new success factor we learned is starting with the collection of negative “ideas” at the beginning of a creativity workshop instead of starting with positive ones. The reason is that the human nature seems to be much more productive if we ask for negative aspects than if we ask for positive ones. One can use this simple mechanism in RE within creativity techniques. Thus, we made very positive experience using the so called FlipFlop technique if we want to get many ideas. This means that instead of gathering ideas for a question like “how can we make sure that our new feature will be successful in the market?” we ask for “how can we make sure that our new feature will be completely unsuccessful in the market?” In our experience, asking like this, will lead to more than double the answers compared to the first, positive version of the question. Of course, we then have to reverse the statements so that the contrary (being successful) can be used for further processing. 2.2
Re-Discussing Existing Success Factors
In the following, we present new insights for seven out of the 12 success factors
that we reported already at CREARE [
Regarding the success factor of “Prepare the convergence step carefully, plan breaks” and “Don’t oversimplify the prioritization and evaluation step” we would like to emphasize now also the explicit need for intermediate prioritization steps during a creativity workshop, and not only the need for a final evaluation at the end. Especially when time is rare to elaborate each intermediate idea in detail, divergence and convergence need to be used alternately. However, as such intermediate prioritizations may quickly end up in time-consuming discussions (e.g., “all ideas are important!”), we made very positive experience with forcing the participants to “select the idea that you like most” in a “first come, first serve” setting.
Regarding the success factor of “Plan enough time” and “Atmosphere” we emphasized that a good (and different) environment and enough time is indispensable for running these workshops. In particular, we experienced that approximately 1.5 days of concentrated work are usually needed for coming up with fruitful results. We also realized that it is extremely important that the participants participate continuously, and that they should not be distracted by emails or parallel meetings. Thus, in the meantime we even tend to postpone or even cancel creativity workshops, if the probability is high that participants have to leave, or if the organizational surrounding conditions are not good enough to work in a creative atmosphere (e.g., no willingness to move to a different location).
In our previous CREARE paper, we also emphasized the need to use even not very well-known “Creativity techniques to enforce variations” even though people might be sceptic if we use something beyond the classic brainstorming. We can clearly confirm that we came to many settings where classical brainstorming style techniques have been used with no or very limited success, and that different techniques created much more innovative ideas. However, we learned in the meantime that there is no strong need for making use of too many different techniques and that it is not needed to always (re-) select from the over 200 existing creativity techniques that are out there. Rather, we recommend adhering to an individual set of techniques with which the moderators have made good experience and which work well in their individual context. In the different projects we conducted so far (cf. Table 1), we always used, similar set of techniques, always with very positive results.
When we reported our lesson “Never start without prior analysis of the problem space in the domain”, we wanted to emphasize that we strongly recommend performing domain, market, problem and requirements analyses beforehand. However, we would like to extend this success factor with our observation that even for moderators that did many creativity workshops in the past, a thorough and detailed planning of each individual workshop is still indispensable. In particular, the creation of a dedicated, detailed script for the moderators explaining, for instance, how the results of one technique are processed by a subsequent technique, the anticipation of results of each techniques (sometimes with trial runs) and the intensive discussion of the analytic and motivating steps in the preparation of the event is needed. In addition, it is essential for the perception of success that the participants experience a logical connection between the results of each step of the creativity workshop.
In CREARE, we also reported that one should “Choose participants carefully”, arguing that one should not invite the narrow minded fellows to the workshops for not letting them slow down the creative group process. As can be seen from the new success factor of “six key ingredients for successful creativity workshops”, we relativized our opinion on this. Of course, we still have to choose the participants carefully, but also with regard to the mix of persons. In addition, we want to emphasize how essential it is to use “evangelists”, i.e., persons that participated in such events and can positively affect other people experiencing this the first time. Second, we always experienced having interdisciplinary in such sessions as a key success factor. In particular, involving a real customer in the process of product innovation is always a win for both sites. We experienced that customers felt a higher loyalty when they are invited to participating in product development. Of course, this involves the risk of disappointing the customers, if no ideas are implemented.
Finally, we also want to comment briefly on the other five success factors that we
reported in our former CREARE paper [
When we reported the success factor “Have fun, but not too much” we argued for finding the right balance between enjoyable time and making clear to the participants that everybody must work hard on the ideas to make the workshop a success. We made good experience with keeping this always in mind.
Also “Include good Incubation” is very valid. We often experience in the new projects that the incubation phase can have significant impact on the generated ideas.
In the new projects, we did not stick much to the factor “Don´t rotate participants unless there is enough time”. We also made good experience with mixing teams, even though one needs to keep in mind that a group of people needs some time to find together to become effective. In this regard, we made good experience with “force fit” in which persons with different backgrounds have to combine different ideas. 3
Related Work
Several further authors reported also their experiences on creativity workshops.
Geschka [
Maiden et al. [
Gryskiewicz et al. [
Rhodes and Thame [
Anderson [
Schlosser et al. [
Mahaux et al. [
Conclusion
We argued that in today’s economy, innovation is the key factor to remain
competitive. Therefore, including innovation into the RE activities by means of
creativity workshops is key to success. This paper extends a previous report on
success factors when performing creativity workshops [