Att studera hur företagsledningen i skandinaviska upplevelseorganisationer drar nytta av anställdas kreativa förmåga, genom att stimulera till ett kreativt arbetsklimat och tillvarata de anställdas idéer. / To study how the management in Scandinavian theme parks takes benefit from the creativity of employees, by stimulating to a creative working climate and making use of employee ideas.

Globally distributed engineering teams are a reality in globally operating companies. However, research on teams is often done by psychologists, with a focus on general team building and working processes, and seldom on engineering teams and the challenges and benefits that are specific to them. In this thesis, experimental research on two globally distributed engineering teams is presented. First, one instance of globally distributed teams in computational fluid dynamics is scrutinized. Second, experimental research on idea generation methods used in globally distributed teams during the conceptual design phase of the product development process is presented. An experimental study simulating the global distribution of a three person Computational Fluid Dynamics team shows that successful sequential processing of a problem is possible given technological support by different internet based technologies. Three succeeding studies researched the influence of space and time during idea generation for an engineering problem, leading to the conclusion in the final study that idea generation in distributed engineering teams is a valid option. It is shown that the idea generation method has a significant effect on the number of ideas generated per team member. Further, the quality, novelty, and variety are each significantly influenced by both the idea generation method chosen and the team member’s location, but in different ways by the same level of each factor. Concluding, both experiments in distributed engineering teams show these teams have unused potential that can be utilized using appropriate process, procedures and tools.

This study puts forward two complementary evolutionary models and explores the potential of the proposed models and the related theses by employing two case studies. The theoretical/conceptual framework of the study refers to architectural theory, design research, and evolutionary epistemology. The study mainly involves application of some key ideas from evolutionary epistemology, Popper&amp / #8217 / s three-world ontology, and the theory of evolution to the field of architecture. The first model is about the nature of the architectural ideas or thought contents and it introduces the idea of conceptual inheritance and an evolutionary conception of architectural ideas. The model proposes a framework that offers an understanding of the life and existence of architectural ideas and their inheritance. It also puts forward an expanded view of architectural ideas that conceives all the thought contents, which architectural designs (or works) and the architectural design process might concern, as architectural ideas. In order to illustrate and discuss the model, some of the architectural ideas carried by Mario Botta&amp / #8217 / s single-family house in Breganzona are selected and the evolutionary lineage of these ideas have been identified and examined in their instances in some of Botta&amp / #8217 / s own designs and in some designs from architectural tradition. The second model is an evolutionary model of the architectural design process. While emphasizing the evolutionary or selectionist character of architectural design in terms of process and inner dynamics, the model conceives architectural design as a process consisting of the two stages of forming/making, and evaluation/selection where in the first stage formative ideas, in the second, selective conditions are operational. In order to illustrate the potentialities of the model, the sketches and the drawings produced during the design process of Mario Botta&amp / #8217 / s single-family house in Breganzona are examined.

Thesis--Heidelberg. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 133-142).

From 1972 until 1989, the artist trio General Idea produced FILE Megazine. The first eight issues of FILE, published from 1972 – 1975, are the focus of this thesis. They stand apart from the later issues because their covers hijacked the look and iconic logo of Life magazine. The red rectangle with white block letters attracted the attention of Time Inc. and resulted in a lawsuit. Rather than fight the corporate giant, General Idea changed their logo after the autumn 1975 issue. FILE, like many artists’ magazines, is typically discussed in idealistic language that privileges the subversive or democratic intentions of the publication while neglecting its significance as a device for the promotion of community and collaboration. I argue that General Idea envisioned FILE as a utopian project intended to produce the world they sought to live in. Authors frequently employ FILE as a tool to discuss General Idea’s work, focusing on it as a mirror or archive of a larger project and emphasizing FILE’s humorous, bawdy, and irreverent aspects. In this thesis, I situate FILE in terms of its historical, art historical, and theoretical frameworks. I pay particular attention to General Idea’s early involvement in the mail art network, FILE’s relationship to 1960s and 1970s artists’ magazines and magazine art, the contemporaneous social and political climate in Canada, and General Idea’s investigation and employment of theoretical frameworks culled from Marshall McLuhan’s text The Medium is the Message and Roland Barthes’ book Mythologies. / text

The passive reliance on ideas to spontaneously emerge within companies is today replaced with more active and continuous ideation management that embraces employees from different functions and knowledge-domains within the company to create and develop ideas. A frequently observed feature in the active management of ideation is the reliance on collaboration and competition mechanisms. These mechanisms use the strength of enabling people to working together towards a shared interest (collaboration) and the power of enabling people to outperform each other in submitting the best idea (competition). The existing research on collaboration and competition in ideation is found inconclusive about their effects as collaboration is stated to both enhance and hamper performance, and as competition is claimed to both drive and reduce performance in ideation. This constitutes a limitation to the management of ideation as it reduces the ability to actively and purposefully guide ideation through a deliberate use of the two mechanisms. The aim of this thesis is to investigate collaboration and competition mechanisms in firm-internal ideation. A multi-methodological approach has been deployed using three different studies: a multiple case study, a survey, and an experiment. This has allowed for the phenomenon of ideation to be studied using different perspectives and for the individual results to be triangulated. The empirical data has been acquired from both industry and experiments with university students. The conducted research has revealed that the inconsistencies on the effects from the two mechanisms are possible to understand and resolve by applying a more detailed level of analysis. When competition is decomposed into components of individual- and group competition, it is found that individual competition drives idea quantity and that it hampers collaboration, whereas group competition instead is found to induce collaboration and to nurture idea quality. This indicates that competition can be used to manage levels of collaboration in ideation, thereby bridging the two mechanisms. This thesis further presents that the individual effects from each of the mechanisms are complementary to each other. This implies that the effect from each mechanism is retained when combined with the other mechanisms, and that the combined effect is equal to, or even greater than, the sum of the individual effects. This combined use is found to drive both ideation efficiency and motivation, and is offering management an interesting third alternative, out of the two mechanisms, of how firm-internal ideation can be managed in a more effective and efficient manner. An analytical framework is included, presenting the interrelationships between the mechanisms, motivation, ideation behavior and the ideation performance. / <p>QC 20150831</p>

Formed in Toronto in 1969, the trio of artists known as General Idea developed a body of work focused on the construction of Active identities and elaborate mythologies parodying the popular myths of art and the artist: the artist as genius, celebrity and avant-garde rebel. It is often said that General Idea's work is at its core an inquiry into art's methods of production, dissemination and reception - an example of the tendency in Western art of the 1960s and '70s towards the dematerialization of the art object and the critique of art's institutions. In this thesis, I argue that General Idea's work also demands to be seen on a broader level, as an exploration of artifice and the manipulation of conventional codes in everyday life. I maintain that, above and beyond their critical interest in art and pop culture, G.I.'s project was to reveal and question the most fundamental social conventions of all: gender and identity. Through their use of pseudonyms, Active identities, pageants and performances, General Idea invite us to consider the masks we wear, the poses we assume and the identities we perform even in our most banal moments, through bodily gestures, speech acts and the manipulation of surfaces. A project like The 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant - staged at a time when normative gender roles and sexual identities were being called into question by the Gay Liberation Movement and the feminist movement - suggests an awareness on the part of General Idea of the constructed nature of identity and gender (a notion later popularized in academic discourse and cultural practice of the 1980s and '90s). General Idea's artistic collaboration spanned more than twenty-five years, but it is the period from the early 1970s to the mid-'80s that constitutes the focus of this thesis. I argue that the boundaries separating masculine and feminine, straight and gay, fact and fiction, are complicated and challenged most effectively in the first two phases of their collaboration. The first phase is typically described as General Idea's "conceptual" phase because of the ephemeral, idea-based nature of the work. It can be said to begin with The 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant and end with the symbolic arson of The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion in 1977. The second phase, marked by a proliferation of poodle imagery in a variety of media, followed hot on the heels of the torching of the Pavillion and continued until the mid-1980s. Although the shift from "conceptual" art to a more material art object necessarily entails a shift in strategies of representation, I argue that both phases of artistic production rely on visual and verbal signifying practices broadly defined as Camp. At a time when it had fallen out of favour as a viable form of self-expression in politicized gay communities, Camp was taken up by General Idea as both a critical tool and a key to attaining visibility - a ticket to ride and a strategic kick in the ass of the dominant order.

Šis magistro darbas yra mėginimas pateikti Jungo teorijos susiformavimo prielaidas ir jos pagrindinio atramos taško – archetipų – sampratą. Pagrindinis Jungo dėmesys sutelktas į asmenybės vidinius išgyvenimus. Patirtis yra svarbiausia pažinimo procese. Jungo išeities taškas – žmogaus egzistencija. Jungas mano, kad tik subjektyvus pažinimas reikšmingas, tačiau toks pažinimas visuomet daugiau ar mažiau atspindi tai, kas bendra visai žmonijai. Subjektyvaus pažinimo pločiui ir gyliui svarbiausia pasaulėžiūra, kuri yra ne kas kita, kaip nuolat tampanti sąmonė. Tiek pasaulis, tiek žmogus keičiasi, todėl nuolatinis naujų turinių perkėlimas į sąmonę - būtina pasaulėžiūros praplėtimo ir atsinaujinimo sąlyga. Platesnė pasaulėžiūra lemia aiškesnį įsižiūrėjimą į pasaulio reiškinius ir asmenines tipines nuostatas. Jungo manymu, kiekvienas žmogus yra unikalus, jo pasaulio ir savęs matymo būdas yra savitas, priklausantis nuo psichologinio tipo. Tokios nuomonių įvairovės, požiūrių reliatyvumo kompensavimo funkciją atlieka žmogaus įgimtas polinkis formuoti ar atkurti bendrąsias idėjas. Sąmonę Jungas laiko nedidele visos psichikos dalimi. Egzistuoja individuali pasąmonė su labiau asmeniniais, unikaliais turiniais, ir kolektyvinė pasąmonė su universaliais visai žmonijai turiniais. Būtent kolektyvinėje pasąmonėje, kurią žmogus atsineša su savimi ateidamas į šį pasaulį, slypi archetipai. Jie yra paveldimas sugebėjimas formuoti idėjas, kurios užpildomos patirties turiniu. Įgimtos ne pačios idėjos... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / This master work is attempt to reveal Jung‘s theory background and to give it‘s main base – archetypes – conception. Jung‘s focus of attention pointed on individual‘s inner life. Own experience is the most important thing in a process of knowledge. Jung‘s beginning is human existence. He thinks that only subjective knowledge is significant. However this kind of knowledge also represents generality more or less. World-view is fundamental to subjective knowledge depth and width. World-view is nothing more nor less than constantly becoming consciousness. Extensive world-view is critical to more clear double-take on universe phenomenones and individual typical attitudes. Jung thinks that every person is unique, everyone sees himself and the universe differently and it depends on psychological type. This opinion variance and attitude relativism needs compensation. This function belongs to inborn human tendency to model general ideas. In Jung‘s theory consciousness is a small part of psyche. There is individual subconsciousness with unique, individual content and collective subconsciousness with universal content. Collective subconsciousness is heritable and it contains archetypes. This is heritable capability to form the ideas, which are completed with own experience content. Not the ideas are heritable, but tendency to create recurrent images and motives at all times and places. However Jung thinks that archetypical forms phenomenon could stand on conditionally mental or even... [to full text]

This thesis presents the groundwork development of an Internet-based idea assessment tool to guide innovators through the design process and educate them on the ‘best practices’ of transforming creative ideas into marketable products. The system triages registered users based on their knowledge, assesses the most suitable level of technical terminology and completes a pre-assessment of ideas. The outputs of the developed system are an idea outline, a product requirements list, a basic opportunity summary and an opportunity score for the idea being assessed. An extensive literature review on popular product development methodologies was conducted to identify which methodology would be robust enough to be used as part of an online process to assess ideas. A review of 3,600 Internet websites on product innovation and product development indicated a lack of guidance offered on the many product design processes available and mixed messages regarding which to use. The Internet search identified a lack of structure for innovators as well as a lack of coordinated educational resources to guide innovators. Combining the results of the literature review and the information gathered during the Internet search, an online system was developed using several programming languages to complete the pre-assessment tasks. A series of tests were conducted using volunteers to establish the viability of the assessment process developed and test the features developed to improve user/website interaction. Suggestions for further development of the model and method will be made at the conclusion of the thesis. The work presented in this thesis provides an excellent foundation for future development of an Internet-based idea assessment tool to guide innovators through the design process.

Research in team science suggests strategies for addressing difficulties that groups face when working together. This dissertation examines how student teams work in project based learning (PBL) environments, with the goal of creating strategies and technology to improve collaboration. The challenge of working in such a group is that the members frequently come from different backgrounds and thus have different ideas on how to accomplish a project. In these groups, teamwork and production of successful solutions depends on whether members consider each other’s dissimilar perspectives. However, the lack of a shared history means that members may have difficulty in taking the time to share and build knowledge collectively. The ultimate goal of my research is to design strategies and technology to improve the inner workings of PBL groups so that they will learn from each other and produce successful outcomes in collaborative settings. The field of computer supported collaborative learning has made much progress on designing, implementing, and evaluating environments that support project based learning. However, most existing research concerns students rather than instructors. Therefore, in my initial research, I explore the needs of the instructors in conducting student assessments (studies one, two). These studies identify five different group processes that are of importance from the instructors’ perspective. My subsequent research focuses on one of them, namely the process of knowledge co-construction, which is a process that instructors have significant difficulty in assessing. In order to support the assessment of the knowledge co-construction process, my research has progressed along two axes: (a) identifying conditions that support the knowledge co-construction process and its relationship to learning and knowledge transfer (studies three, four, and five), and (b) automatically monitoring the knowledge co-construction process using natural language processing and machine learning (studies six ~ nine). Studies five and eight look at a specific type of knowledge co-construction process called the idea co-construction process (ICC). ICC is the process of taking up, transforming, or otherwise building on an idea expressed earlier in a conversation. I argue that ICC is essential for groups to function well in terms of knowledge sharing and perspective taking.