The Creativity Continuum: Towards a Classification of Creative Problem Solving Techniques

It can be argued that companies may innovate on a more regular basis if groups and individuals can be encouraged to think more creatively. One method of encouraging novel ideas is to undertake creative problem solving (CPS). There are a number of different techniques that can enhance creative thinking. Some of these techniques require less imagination and produce less novel results than others. Individuals and group facilitators must choose which creative problem solving technique(s) to use for their specific situation. Some techniques, for example, may leave an inexperienced group feeling uncomfortable (e.g. if they are asked to draw pictures or develop fantasies) although they are often more effective than the more analytical methods. It may be helpful, therefore, to classify creative problem solving techniques so that individuals can easily choose an appropriate technique for their specific situation. This paper offers such a classification, which categorises the creative problem solving techniques into paradigm preserving, paradigm stretching and paradigm breaking. Some implications and future research are also presented.     

Towards Deeper Understanding of the Search Interfaces of the Deep Web

Many databases have become Web-accessible through form-based search interfaces (i.e., HTML forms) that allow users to specify complex and precise queries to access the underlying databases. In general, such a Web search interface can be considered as containing an interface schema with multiple attributes and rich semantic/meta-information; however, the schema is not formally defined in HTML. Many Web applications, such as Web database integration and deep Web crawling, require the construction of the schemas. In this paper, we first propose a schema model for representing complex search interfaces, and then present a layout-expression based approach to automatically extract the logical attributes from search interfaces. We also rephrase the identification of different types of semantic information as a classification problem, and design several Bayesian classifiers to help derive semantic information from extracted attributes. A system, WISE-iExtractor, has been implemented to automatically construct the schema from any Web search interfaces. Our experimental results on real search interfaces indicate that this system is highly effective.     

In Search of Organisational Creativity: The Role of Knowledge Management

Contemporary management theories lead to systematic practices that appear to limit the creative capacity of any given organisation. Often there is a closed system paradigm, when in reality organisations are open systems. A desire to seek a rational way of operating is not necessarily negative, but gives priority to mechanisms and results over processes or contents. Drawing on practical experiences in architectural design within the construction industry, we point to approaches that inhibit the emergence of creativity in an organisation, and which can be harmful from the business point of view in the long run. It is suggested that one way to overcome these difficulties lies in improvements in knowledge management.     

Creativity and Innovation in Haute Cuisine: Towards a Systemic Model

The contribution of this study is an increased understanding of personal creativity and the innovation process in haute cuisine, a validation of the socio‐cultural systems view of creativity and a model that accounts for the socio‐cultural dimensions of haute cuisine. In this paper we discuss existing views that conceptualize creativity and innovation in this sector as a sequential developmental process following the principles of operations management. However, based on in‐depth interviews with world‐renowned chefs, we argue for a systemic rather than sequential developmental process view. The reason for this is that the chefs interviewed understand the ‘creativity part’ of the innovation process as an embodied experience often guided by intuition and the ‘innovation part’ as a process of social evaluation greatly dependent on the perception, knowledge and value judgement of the testers from the leading restaurant guides. The main implications of the findings go beyond the haute cuisine sector and open areas for future research on creativity and intuition more generally.     

XML 关键词检索的查询理解

与纯文本文档集相比,使用语义标签标注的半结构化的XML文档集,有助于信息检索系统更好地理解待检索文档.同样,结构化查询,比如SQL,XQuery和Xpath,相对于纯关键词查询更加清晰地表达了用户的查询意图.这二者都能够帮助信息检索系统获得更好的检索精度.但关键词查询因其简单和易用性,仍被广泛使用.提出了XNodeRelation算法,以自动推断关键词查询的结构化信息(条件/目标节点类型).与已有的推断算法相比,综合了XML文档集的模式和统计信息以及查询关键词出现的上下文及其关联关系等推断用户的查询意图.大量的实验验证了该算法的有效性.     

Does Organizing for Creativity Really Lead to Innovation?

Stimulation of creativity has long been assumed to enhance innovation. Accordingly, organizing the work environment to unleash the creative potential of employees has been studied extensively. However, the present creativity literature has yet to produce sufficient empirical evidence to confirm this assumption, and therefore the generalizability of the relationship between organizational creativity and innovation remains indeterminate. This paper adopts the leading creativity and innovation models to identify the work environment characteristics stimulating creativity, and subsequently analyses whether this environment leads to product and process innovation in small and medium sized firms. The findings demonstrate that this environment does not yield the same results for product and process innovation, and particular factors of the work environment do not behave according to the expectations to enhance the likelihood of doing innovation. The study discusses these findings and advances the literature by showing that the relationship between organizational creativity and innovation is not generalizable, but is contingent upon the innovation type and, as the discussion will show, particular characteristics related to the firm. Accordingly, the paper suggests new research opportunities to further explore organizational creativity and innovation.     

Related Axis: The Extension to XPath Towards Effective XML Search

We investigate the limitations of existing XML search methods and propose a new semantics, related relationship, to effectively capture meaningful relationships of data elements from XML data in the absence of structural constraints. Then we make an extension to XPath by introducing a new axis, related axis, to specify the related relationship between query nodes so as to enhance the flexibility of XPath. We propose to reduce the cost of computing the related relationship by a new schema summary that summarizes the related relationship from the original schema without any loss. Based on this schema summary, we introduce two indices to improve the performance of query processing. Our algorithm shows that the evaluation of most queries can be equivalently transformed into just a few selection and value join operations, thus avoids the costly structural join operations. The experimental results show that our method is effective and efficient in terms of comparing the effectiveness of the related relationship with existing keyword search semantics and comparing the efficiency of our evaluation methods with existing query engines.     

Organizing Individual and Collective Creativity: Flying in the Face of Creativity Clichés

The growing complexity of problems requires collective solutions to produce creative outcomes. Organizational theory on creativity has been extensively developed in recent decades, but two problematic issues remain. First, no current comprehensive model explains the development of collective creativity. Second, no empirical research has been conducted on the process of theory dissemination and its relevance within the managerial community. This paper provides evidence which can inform the design of collective creative projects within organizations, flying in the face of some managerial clichés. We design a research project which enables managerial sensemaking to emerge and which proposes a comprehensive approach to the design of team creativity. From a research design involving 24 managers and 98 eleven‐person groups, results confirm that creativity is not only about creative genius, and design for creativity is not a matter of linear correlation but implies a more sophisticated and integrative approach according to which individual creative skills, team dynamics and organizational solutions interact with each other to produce a collective creative performance.     

Innovation Spaces: Towards a Framework for Understanding the Role of the Physical Environment in Innovation

Firms are paying increasing attention to the physical environments in which creative and innovative activities take place. These environments reflect the firm's strategic intentions towards innovation and provide a physical embodiment of their desired modes of working. To date, this new phenomenon has received little academic attention. Based on both literature and also the authors' combined experiences through observing firms in Europe, this paper proposes a simple framework to aid practitioners and academics to better understand the design, role and goals of such spaces.     

Mimetics: Towards Understanding Human Actions Out of Context

International Journal of Computer Vision - Recent methods for video action recognition have reached outstanding performances on existing benchmarks. However, they tend to leverage context such as...     

Individual Creativity during the Ideation Phase of Product Innovation: An Interactional Perspective

Although there is increasing acknowledgement that employees' creative ideas are fundamental for product innovation, and many companies use cross‐functional teams to increase employee creativity, there has been little empirical testing of how individual personality and group context interactively affect individual creativity. The purpose of this study is threefold: to examine the relationship between personality and individual creativity; to assess how this relationship interacts with group diversity; and to determine whether the interaction effects between personality traits and gender diversity are mediated by individual knowledge sharing. The results of an experiment based on a sample of 142 working adults show that openness to experience and extraversion are positively related to individual creativity, whereas neuroticism and conscientiousness are negatively related to individual creativity. Furthermore, the impacts of openness to experience and extraversion on individual creativity, respectively, are moderated by both functional diversity and gender diversity. In addition, these interaction effects are mediated by individual knowledge sharing. Interestingly, this study also finds that the direction of functional diversity's moderating effects depends on the level of group diversity.     

Individual Creativity and Team Climate in Software Development Projects: The Mediating Role of Team Decision Processes

This study investigates how individual creativity is related to the quality of team decision processes and team climate, and the mediating role of team decision processes between individual creativity and team climate. A multi‐level theoretical model was proposed and partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS‐SEM) was conducted on a sample of 139 software development projects. The results suggest that: (i) individual creativity improves the quality of team decision processes, (ii) team decision processes are positively associated with four dimensions of team climate (organizational support, innovation orientation, goal orientation and informal structure), and (iii) team decision processes partially mediate between individual creativity and team climate. In particular, the obtained results stress the role of individual creativity in the formation and evolution of a positive climate by means of team decision processes. The study implies that managers should recognize the value of creative individuals as the basic source of competitive advantage and success. It further discusses the managerial implications of the findings as well as limitations and constructive new directions for future studies to improve software development team performance.     

面向搜索引擎的自然语言理解的设计与实现*

提出了一种针对智能检索的自然语言理解的实现模型。该模型通过句模分析、分词和概念扩展的方法来理解问句,在一定程度上提高理解自然语言的能力。详细介绍了其系统架构、实现思想和原理。最后通过一系列的实例来对普通搜索引擎和加载了本模型的搜索引擎进行测试。实验结果表明,提出的模型能有效地分析自然语言提问,提高信息检索的准确性和智能性。     

Towards a new approach to query search engines: the Search Tree visual language

In this paper, we describe theit Search Tree visual language. It is a novel methodology able to support users to build up complex queries to be run on given search engines. For using this visual language, neither parentheses nor precedence rules are needed, nor the specific ability to perform advanced search tasks. The language is proven to have the same expressive power as the expressions in Sum Of Product form. In order to prove the appropriateness of our proposal, we measured the usability of the proposed querying approach against the traditional Yahoo ^TM web search query language. Results show that, even if both the approaches fully support users in terms of efficacy, the Search Tree visual language significantly improves task efficiency, both in terms of the number of actions performed and the time requested with respect to the advanced search interface. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

面向安卓自动化测试工具综合评估

自动化测试工具是安卓应用质量保障的主要手段.随着安卓版本多样性、底层硬件差异性(碎片化)以及逻辑复杂性增加,自动化测试迎来新的挑战.为解决这些问题,近年来,业界开发出大量自动化测试工具.但是现有工具数量多,并且测试重点多样,测试人员选择工具时存在一定的困扰.为帮助测试人员选择最佳测试工具,实现对自动化测试工具的统一评估,提出了面向安卓自动化测试工具多特征综合评估方法(comprehensiveevaluation of Android automated testing, CEAT),并将其实现为便于测试人员使用的平台. CEAT在引入测试领域广泛接受的3个评估指标,即代码覆盖率、异常检出率、融合多版本兼容度得分的基础上,进一步基于变异测试的思想引入变异杀死率,并从用户体验出发引入UI控件覆盖率.以上5个指标构成CEAT整个体系,从而实现安卓自动化测试工具的综合多维评估.为验证CEAT的效果,生成了1 089个变异应用的待测应用集,在包含6个移动设备的真机集群中部署实验,对5个自动化测试工具适配并执行5 040次测试任务.最终结果表明:i) 5个指标从不同角度对自动化测试工具进行评估,...     

Understanding the behavior of Solution-Guided Search for job-shop scheduling

This paper investigates reasons behind the behavior of constructive Solution-Guided Search (SGS) on job-shop scheduling optimization problems. In particular, two, not mutually exclusive, hypotheses are investigated: (1) Like randomized restart, SGS exploits heavy-tailed distributions of search cost; and (2) Like local search, SGS exploits search space structure such as the clustering of high-quality solutions. Theoretical and experimental evidence strongly support both hypotheses. Unexpectedly, the experiments into the second hypothesis indicate that the performance of randomized restart and standard chronological backtracking are also correlated with search space structure. This result leaves open the question of finding the mechanism by which such structure is exploited as well as suggesting a deeper connection between the performance of constructive and local search.     

Towards Increased Understanding of Open Data Use for Software Development

Information Systems Frontiers - The way open data resources of varied type and volume are used by software applications remains only partly known. In this study, following CRoss-Industry Standard...     

Index Navigator: Search Engine with Reasoning for Understanding and Expressing User's Changing Mind

When a search engine user becomes interested in a new area for him/herself, it is difficult for the user to enter a query precisely expressing the interest or to select areas including the interest, because he/she is just a beginner of the interest. This paper presents a system called Index Navigator, which tells areas a user is interested in, keywords he/she should enter as a query, and documents concerning his/her interest. A tough problem for such a system is to understand the user's interest from the query he/she entered. Index Navigator employs an inference method called Cost-based Cooperation of Multi-Abducers (CCMA), for understanding a user's interest from the history of the user's queries (expression of interest in incomplete keywords), even if the changing speed of the user's interest can not be estimated. With this device, Index Navigator guided the user to areas, keywords and documents relevant to his/her interest, according to the experimental results.