Electronic Creativity Techniques for Organizational Innovation

Innovation is the key to survival. Domestic and international competitions, changing government regulations, and rapidly evolving global market conditions demand constant and visionary innovation. The aim of this paper is to explore ways of using advance electronic and communication technology to improve innovation in organizations. This paper proposes that two group creativity techniques, PMI and synectics, should be implemented electronically in Group Support Systems to complement electronic brainstorming and support group idea generation. Not only are these two group creativity techniques well-developed and popular in the industry, their electronic counterparts have the added capability of transcending space and time constraints. A comparison of electronic brainstorming, PMI, synectics, and their verbal counterparts is discussed in the paper.