Using recommender systems to support idea generation stage

Abstract

In order to successfully cope with this era of rapid changes, organizations need to develop effective and efficient innovation processes that ensure continuous stream of new valuable ideas that lead to useful innovations. However, generating novel and useful ideas remains a challenging and crucial innovation task. The current paper presents a new use of recommendation systems in the first key activity of the Front End of innovation, and which can assist organizations to improve their ways of generating new ideas. Actually in this paper, we investigate the particular use of recommender systems in the idea generation context to encourage actors to contribute their ideas and ensure the good quality of submitted content. We first present the motivation behind this work and define the concept of recommendation. From this, we deduct the different advantages of using recommender systems in idea generation stage. Next, we provide an overview of existing recommendation approaches. From the literature, we draw a synthesis of important learning gathered. Then, we analyze and discuss based on a set of defined characteristics the use of recommendation systems in this initial phase of idea generation. From the results of this analysis, we formulate a concluding remarks aiming to identify the technique which seems the most suitable to meet our qualitative approach in this specific context.

Keywords: idea generation, Recommendation Systems, creativity, collaboration, quality,
Innovation.