In 2001, Gerald Haman stormed the corporate world by generating 454 000 ideas in 60 minutes delivering "Thinkathon", which he defined as the “world's greatest brainstorming tool”. Easily replicated, Singapore corporate leaders saw the “Thinkathon” as a 'quick fix' to jumpstart mass ideas for Innovative Initiatives in the perennial search for that critical sustaining differentiator for the city state to compete regionally and ever more now, as a developed nation, globally. However, the “Thinkathon” merely provided a good harvest of ideas, but saw no gains in innovative breakthroughs. Alex Osborn (1953), the father of brainstorming, initiated brainstorming as a 3 phase program of fact-finding, idea finding and solution finding but “Thinkathon” provided only mass idea-finding. This thesis sets out to address the gaps in salvaging the effectiveness of mass brainstorming “Thinkathon” if organizations in Singapore still opt to engage this “perceived creative tool” as a jumpstart for Innovative Initiatives. / Since the original “Thinkathon” did not provide a literary foundation, in this thesis we re-examined the evolution of cognitive mental thinking processes from self to group and finally to creative mass brainstorming, to help failsafe the “Thinkathon”, rendering it literally structured and “ideaworthy” to be used independently as a jumpstart Innovative tool. Adapting the original “Thinkathon”, it was put through an empirical series of pilot runs that came along with feedback observations, ultimately metamorphising into a structured 4-step creative ideation approach by-product called “Thinkathon II”. The new Thinkathon II was injected with a new process “Co-Operacy” (Hunter, Dale 1977) which until then was a mere untested philosophy but had proven effective in 'mass consensus decision'. This was useful in filtering mass ideas from a quantitative to a qualitative stage, without premature eradication or adulteration to the original generated ideas, a process which was not available in the original “Thinkathon” by Gerald Haman. / After a series of successful pilot runs which endorsed its efficiency, Thinkathon II was marketed to the public which further reaffirmed its effectiveness as an innovative jumpstart tool for Innovative Initiatives. The final acid test came at the 7th International Association of Facilitators (IAF) Conference held in Singapore on 25th August that gave an added opportunity to showcase the Thinkathon II, sampled by worldwide Facilitators who welcomed the new 4-step structured mass ideation process. / Thus, this thesis, which resulted in a new by-product, the “Thinkathon II”, not only closed the gaps originally created by the founder of Thinkathon, it also provided literature on the art and science of mass idea brainstorming which until now was uncharted. It also disproved the claim made by Tony Proctor (1995) “that large numbers of ideas cannot find a place for quality”. This achievement was also acknowledged by the originator Mr Gerald Haman who saw the added value in rendering his original Thinkathon more "solution-focused". Hence, “Thinkathon II” is now a founded new approach where corporate leaders can use this new “mass idea brainstorming” process, which is worthy of its definition as an innovation tool to jumpstart any Innovation Initiative. / Thesis (PhDBusinessandManagement)--University of South Australia, 2005.

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Risk identification is the first step of risk management for construction projects. Project experts use many different methods to identify risk factors, such as decision trees, standard checklists, questionnaires and the Hazard and Operability procedure, but brainstorming sessions are among the most successful methods for identifying risks offering advantages not encountered in any of the others identification methods. Although the brainstorming technique is widespread in the construction industry, it typically is not used to its full capacity. This may be due to brainstorming literature ambiguity, variations in reporting technique usage in the literature, and lack of a methodology outlining the use of the brainstorming technique specifically for risk identification purposes. In this thesis, the merits, procedures, and appropriate applications of the brainstorming technique are outlined. Implications of the session, the session leader, the participants, and the output are explored, and best practices for risk identification brainstorming sessions are identified. / Construction Engineering and Management

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Jane L. Reimers, Florida State University, College of Business, Dept. of Accounting. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 15, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis documents the design and implementation of an augmented reality (AR) application that could be extended to support group brainstorming tasks remotely. Additionally, it chronicles our investigation into the helpfulness of traditional collaborative cues in this novel application of augmented reality. We implemented IdeaSpace, an interactive application that emulates an affinity diagramming environment on an AR headset. In our application, users can organize and manipulate virtual sticky notes around a central virtual board. We performed a user study, with each session requiring users to perform an affinity diagramming clustering task with and without common collaborative cues. Our results indicate that the presence or absence of cues has little effect on this task, or that other factors played a larger role than cue condition, such as learning effects. Our results also show that our application's usability could be improved. We conclude this document with a discussion of our results and the design implications that may arise from them. / Master of Science / Our project was aimed at creating an app for modern augmented reality headsets that could help people perform group brainstorming sessions remotely from each other. We were also interested in finding out the benefits or downsides of some of the design decisions that recent research in remote augmented reality recommends, such as lines showing where a user is focusing and visualizations for a user's head and hands. In our app, which we dubbed IdeaSpace, users were faced with a virtual corkboard and a number of virtual sticky notes, similar to what they might expect in a traditional brainstorming session. We ran three-person study sessions comparing design techniques recommended by literature to an absence of such techniques and did not find they helped much in our task. We also found that our application was not as usable as we had hoped and could be improved in future iterations. We conclude our paper discussing what our results might mean and what can be learned for the future.

This paper presents a design, implementation, and evaluation of an augmented reality virtual environment to support collaborative brainstorming sessions. We specifically support brainstorming in the form of ideation on sticky notes, a common method to organize a large number of ideas in space with sticky notes on a board. Our environment allows users to integrate physical pen and paper used in a brainstorming session with the support of augmented reality headsets, so that we can support further interaction modes and remote collaboration as well. We use an AR HMD to capture images containing notes, detect and crop them with a remote server, then spawn the detected notes in to enable virtual viewing and manipulation. We evaluate our input method for generating notes in a user study In doing so, we attempt to determine whether traditional input tools like pen and paper can be seamlessly integrated into augmented reality, and see if these tools improve efficiency and comprehensibility over previous augmented reality input methods. / Master of Science / Collaborative brainstorming sessions often involve rapid ideation and outputting those ideas on physical sticky notes with others. We built a virtual environment, IdeaSpace, to support collaborative brainstorming in augmented reality head-mounted devices. To support the activities of rapid ideation and creating notes to express those ideas, we developed an input method for creating virtual note objects for augmented reality collaborative brain-storming sessions. We allow users to use traditional tools like pens and sticky notes to write out their notes, then scan them in using device cameras by uttering a voice command. We evaluated this input method to determine the advantages and disadvantages it brings to rapid ideation in augmented reality, and how it affects comprehensibility compared to existing gesture-based input methods in augmented reality. We found that our pen and paper input method outperformed our own baseline gesture input method in efficiency, comfort, usability, and comprehensibility when creating virtual notes. While we cannot conclude that our experiment proved that pen and paper is outright better than all gesture-based input methods, we can safely say pen and paper can be a valuable input method in augmented reality brainstorming for creating notes.

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This dissertation proposes the Causal Map technique, a systematic method to support the production of creative solutions using verbal cause-and-effect prompts and an external visual representation of the derived causal chain. An empirical study is described that compares performance of the Causal Map technique in prompting the production of creative solutions to a real-world problem to two other problem-solving scaffolds: individual Brainstorming and the Five Whys technique. Participants using the Causal Map technique were found to produce, on average, more than twice the number of solutions compared to participants using the individual Brainstorming or Five Whys techniques. Participant solutions were rated on the evaluative dimensions of Creativity, Originality, Effectiveness, and Feasibility. On each of these dimensions, the mean rating for the three highest rated solutions produced by each participant was compared across conditions. On all dimensions, the mean ratings of the top three solutions produced using the Causal Map technique were nominally higher than the means for the other conditions. These differences were significant between the Causal Map and Five Whys on all dimensions, and significant between the Causal Map and Brainstorming in effectiveness.