idSPACE · Tooling of and training for collaborative, distributed product innovation

Industries increasingly rely on innovative design. Innovative design is characterised by an intense, collaborative process of generating and exploring ideas meant to contribute to the solution of particular problems. Innovators go through cycles of divergence, in which new ideas are generated and explored, and convergence, in which new ideas are valued and detailed. These cycles rely on knowledge elicitation (formal learning) and knowledge sharing (informal learning). Innovators also need appropriate tools to generate ideas, reuse them, take them apart, criticise them, or even reject them. Currently, innovation processes use a large variety of tools, relatively independent of each other, with little or no regard for past efforts, with little or no attention to the context in which they arose. Also little effort is made to safeguard and share the results of the innovation process for future use, in other contexts, with other people. Optimally to foster the growth of new ideas and the elaboration of new production processes, past knowledge needs to be elicited and new knowledge needs to be shared and stored, all the while being aware of the rich context in which the ideas arose, were elaborated and fleshed out. To that end we will to design and build a responsive web-based environment – idSpace. It will offer an integrated suite of knowledge eliciting and sharing tools, and create a collective, sharable memory of the entire design process. idSpace, we surmise, forms the substrate for the emergence of a productive and lasting community of practice and learning that will maximally foster innovation. We will test our claims with users in realistic if not authentic settings as well as through the consultation of experts.