This paper investigates the role of constraints in limiting and enhancing creativity in engineering design. Based on a review of literature relating constraints to creativity, the paper presents a ...longitudinal participatory study from Coloplast A/S, a major international producer of disposable medical equipment. At Coloplast, constraints played a fundamental role and the observations show the important, dual role of constraints in terms of being a limitation and a prerequisite for creativity. Too few or too many constraints had a negative impact on creativity, whereas the formulation, rationale and ownership of formal constraints played a crucial role in defining their influence on creativity - along with the tacit constraints held by the designers. The designers were found to be highly constraint focused, and four main creative strategies for constraint manipulation were observed: blackboxing, removal, introducing and revising. Constraints introduced late in a project contributed to the generation of new solutions to old problems, and existing solutions were creatively adopted to satisfy new constraints. This paper recommends creative constraint-handling strategies, as well as identifying potential directions for future research on the relationship between creativity and constraints.
We are in the midst of a mental health crisis with major depressive disorder being the most prevalent among mental health disorders and up to 30% of patients not responding to first-line treatments. ...Noninvasive Brain Stimulation (NIBS) techniques have proven to be effective in treating depression. However, there is a fundamental problem of scale. Currently, any type of NIBS treatment requires patients to repeatedly visit a clinic to receive brain stimulation by trained personnel. This is an often-insurmountable barrier to both patients and healthcare providers in terms of time and cost. In this perspective, we assess to what extent Transcranial Electrical Stimulation (TES) might be administered with remote supervision in order to address this scaling problem and enable neuroenhancement of mental resilience at home. Social, ethical, and technical challenges relating to hardware- and software-based solutions are discussed alongside the risks of stimulation under- or over-use. Solutions to provide users with a safe and transparent ongoing assessment of aptitude, tolerability, compliance, and/or misuse are proposed, including standardized training, eligibility screening, as well as compliance and side effects monitoring. Looking into the future, such neuroenhancement could be linked to prevention systems which combine home-use TES with digital sensor and mental monitoring technology to index decline in mental wellbeing and avoid relapse. Despite the described social, ethical legal, and technical challenges, the combination of remotely supervised, at-home TES setups with dedicated artificial intelligence systems could be a powerful weapon to combat the mental health crisis by bringing personalized medicine into people’s homes.
The objective and scope of this Limited Output Transcranial Electrical Stimulation 2023 (LOTES-2023) guidance is to update the previous LOTES-2017 guidance. These documents should therefore be ...considered together. The LOTES provides a clearly articulated and transparent framework for the design of devices providing limited output (specified low-intensity range) transcranial electrical stimulation for a variety of intended uses. These guidelines can inform trial design and regulatory decisions, but most directly inform manufacturer activities - and hence were presented in LOTES-2017 as “Voluntary industry standard for compliance controlled limited output tES devices”. In LOTES-2023 we emphasize that these standards are largely aligned across international standards and national regulations (including those in USA, EU, and South Korea), and so might be better understood as “Industry standards for compliance controlled limited output tES devices”. LOTES-2023 is therefore updated to reflect a consensus among emerging international standards, as well as best available scientific evidence. “Warnings” and “Precautions” are updated to align with current biomedical evidence and applications. LOTES standards applied to a constrained device dose range, but within this dose range and for different use-cases, manufacturers are responsible to conduct device-specific risk management.
•Updates LOTES-2017 standard.•Detailed voluntary manufacturer guidance for limited output tES to minimize risks, while supporting access and innovation.•Outlined industry guidance that are consistent with and expand on the current regulatory standards.
Creativity is increasingly being recognized as important raw material for innovation, which highlights the importance of identifying ways to increase the creativity of practitioners. In this article, ...we describe our efforts to design a creativity training program specifically for innovation practitioners. Our aim was to develop a program that would be both theoretically sound (i.e., based on a rigorous scientific foundation) and relevant for practitioners (i.e., applicable to real-world contexts). Our transdisciplinary study employed co-creation as a method to ensure that three layers of focus would be taken into consideration: metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive monitoring, and metacognitive control. The result is a program called Creative Awareness Training, which is based on the new Know-Recognize-React model.
Throughout decades of creativity research, a range of creativity training programs have been developed, tested, and analyzed. In 2004 Scott and colleagues published a meta‐analysis of all creativity ...training programs to date, and the review presented here sat out to identify and analyze studies published since the seminal 2004 review. Focusing on quantitative studies of creativity training programs for adults, our systematic review resulted in 22 publications. All studies were analyzed, but comparing the reported effectiveness of training across studies proved difficult due to methodological inconsistencies, variations in reporting of results as well as types of measures used. Thus a consensus for future studies is called for to answer the question: Which elements make one creativity training program more effective than another? This is a question of equal relevance to academia and industry, as creativity training is a tool that can contribute to enhancement of organizational creativity and subsequently innovation. However, to answer the question, future studies of creativity training programs need to be carefully designed to contribute to a more transparent landscape. Thus this paper proposes a methodological research standard consisting of three criteria, to which researchers can look when designing future studies of the effectiveness of creativity training.
Creativity is a critical component that feeds into all stages of innovation and design processes by promoting inspiration, ideation, and implementation of ideas, revealing the need for thorough ...research to support design creativity. Assessment of product creativity is a reoccurring topic in creativity research, while the role of consumer's knowledge of the creative process behind the product is fairly unexplored. In this paper, we present an empirical study investigating whether providing information about a complex development process could amplify consumer's perception of product creativity. Does storytelling about the process contribute to amplifying creativity ratings? What form of storytelling is needed to make an impact? Results from 134 respondents showed a small but not significant amplifying effect from the additional process information; however, an important learning can be drawn about the form of storytelling needed. An absolute minimal form was chosen here, displaying the need for investigating other, more elaborate forms. Additionally, the analysis showed that creativity was an important driver for the assessment of other product attributes such as purchasability, portraying the importance of design creativity and underlining the importance of further investigating the role of creative process information in amplifying consumer's perception of creativity in products.
This article investigates how neuroscience in general, and neuroscience of creativity in particular, can be used in teaching "applied creativity" and the usefulness of this approach to creativity ...training. The article is based on empirical data and our experiences from the Applied NeuroCreativity (ANC) program, taught at business schools in Denmark and Canada. In line with previous studies of successful creativity training programs the ANC participants are first introduced to cognitive concepts of creativity, before applying these concepts to a relevant real world creative problem. The novelty in the ANC program is that the conceptualization of creativity is built on neuroscience, and a crucial aspect of the course is giving the students a thorough understanding of the neuroscience of creativity. Previous studies have reported that the conceptualization of creativity used in such training is of major importance for the success of the training, and we believe that the neuroscience of creativity offers a novel conceptualization for creativity training. Here we present pre/post-training tests showing that ANC students gained more fluency in divergent thinking (a traditional measure of trait creativity) than those in highly similar courses without the neuroscience component, suggesting that principles from neuroscience can contribute effectively to creativity training and produce measurable results on creativity tests. The evidence presented indicates that the inclusion of neuroscience principles in a creativity course can in 8 weeks increase divergent thinking skills with an individual relative average of 28.5%.
This paper investigates the gate screening of ideas in engineering design, by examination of the validity of employee voting schemes and biases associated with such voting. After conducting an ...employee-driven innovation project at a major producer of disposable medical equipment, 99 ideas had to be screened for further development. Inspired by the concept of 'wisdom of the crowd', all ideas were individually rated by a broad selection of employees, and the ratings were used to investigate two biases in employee voting: visual complexity and endowment effect/ownership of ideas. The visual complexity bias was found to be a predictor for selection, but experienced employees were less affected by the bias. The ownership bias was potent in that every employee proved to be more likely to select his or her own ideas over other ideas, but this effect disappeared when aggregating across the crowd of employees. Furthermore, this study compared the employee selection with the preference of a small team of executives, showing that the employee voting significantly correlates with the preferences of the executives: overall, in the top 12 selected ideas and in the choice of idea categories. This match increases when including only the ratings of the most experienced employees.
A significant amount of European basic and clinical neuroscience research includes the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and low intensity transcranial electrical stimulation (tES), ...mainly transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). Two recent changes in the EU regulations, the introduction of the Medical Device Regulation (MDR) (2017/745) and the Annex XVI have caused significant problems and confusions in the brain stimulation field. The negative consequences of the MDR for non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) have been largely overlooked and until today, have not been consequently addressed by National Competent Authorities, local ethical committees, politicians and by the scientific communities. In addition, a rushed bureaucratic decision led to seemingly wrong classification of NIBS products without an intended medical purpose into the same risk group III as invasive stimulators.
Overregulation is detrimental for any research and for future developments, therefore researchers, clinicians, industry, patient representatives and an ethicist were invited to contribute to this document with the aim of starting a constructive dialogue and enacting positive changes in the regulatory environment.
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