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Top1. An Integration Model On Brainstorming And Extenics For Intelligent Innovation In Big Data Environment
Brainstorming (BS), also known as intellectual stimulation, is a method of stimulating creative thinking proposed by Alex F. Osborne, an American creativity theorist and businessman, in 1938 (Shui, 2003). Now it has been widely used in creative thinking activities to generate new possible solutions to problems and has become an effective method for developing creativity, mainly on intuitive and divergent thinking (Al-Samarraie & Hurmuzan, 2018; Osborn, 1987). To ensure a successful brainstorming process, a highly active mind and unrestricted free association and discussion are all essential ingredients. However, at its foundation, brainstorming relies heavily on human brain capabilities, particularly on the experience and knowledge they possess. Today’s Internet environment provides us good opportunities for innovation (Zhuang et al., 2017; Li et al., 2015). There is an increasing amount of information and knowledge on the Internet that can be used by brainstorming methods to overcome the shortcomings of the human brain.
Extenics is a new discipline that is used to obtain systematic creativity by studying the extension and transformation of things in formal models. It has been widely used to solve contradictory problems based on the theory of extension sets, basic-element theory, and extension transformation methods since 1983 (Yang & Cai, 2013; Yang, 2019; Yang & Cai, 2007). Its fundamental role is to inspire thinking and improve the efficiency of the actual innovation process (Li et al., 2016). The extension innovation method is a formal and quantifiable method to generate ideas for solving various contradictory problems with the basic theory of modeling, expanding, reasoning, and transformation in Extenics (Yang & Li, 2012).
While innovation is playing an increasingly important role in research and business (Chen & Lv, 2018), the brainstorming method is being used more and more. However, some shortcomings of the method have been found in practice. To overcome them, various brainstorming techniques have been proposed to facilitate and enhance creativity during idea generation sessions. Also, many other improvement solutions have been proposed, such as the use of computers for anonymous brainstorming to remove the bias caused by subjective factors (Maaravi, 2021).
At present, researchers aim to use various improvement plans to reduce understanding difficulties and inconsistencies caused by subjective factors in the brainstorming process. The description method of thinking and things in Extenics can objectify and model subjective evaluations and explore the correlation between things by establishing a basic element model. Existing research lacks a combination of Extenics and brainstorming, as well as mutually supportive methods. In this paper, we introduce the Extenics theory to the brainstorming process to reduce over reliance on personal ability and experience. Moreover, by combining the extension innovation method, we managed to support idea generation in a systematic way and thus optimize the brainstorming method.
The rest of our paper is organized as follows. The second section of this paper provides a literature review on innovation and brainstorming in the big data environment. The third section analyzes the attributes, shortcomings, and the general application process of the brainstorming method. The fourth section introduces Extenics theory and the application of the extension innovation method. Then we propose the basic idea of integrating Extenics with brainstorming methods. We also design the general application process and the human-computer interaction model of the new brainstorming method with the support of information technology and artificial intelligence. The fifth section verifies the effectiveness of the new method through use cases. Finally, the last section concludes the paper and discusses future research directions.