Engineering design of a service system: An empirical study

Industrial creativity research usually focuses on new product development. The prevailing dominance of the service sector calls for research into the nature of creativity in the framework of new service development. We describe and analyze an empirical study of creativity when producing a conceptual design of a service system – a qualitative description of the system as a set of components and their characteristics. A problem – design of an after-sales service facility – was given to two groups of students. The first group was required to use convergent thinking: to assign appropriate values to a prespecified set of attributes describing the system components. The second group was instructed to produce a design through divergent thinking: to ideate both attributes and appropriate values. Our objective was to determine the merits and demerits of these techniques and to suggest a hybrid design procedure which can take advantage of the benefits of both. We asked six questions: Which group is more creative? Do both groups interpret the design case in the same way? Do the members within each group interpret the design case in the same way? Do both sets of designs cover all the characteristics of the service system? Do they consider both requirements and specifications? How well do they answer the design problem? We found that divergent thinking produces a larger combined set of attributes but more limited designs per participant; both groups tend to interpret the problem differently; the second group tends to generate similar within-group designs – despite the individual freedom of ideation; most characteristics are adequately covered by both groups; the second group is biased in favour of specifications; and the second group provides a better answer to the design problem. We propose a combination of brainstorming and predefinition to achieve the advantages of both approaches: a large set of ideated attributes and a complementary set of predefined attributes when ideation is “exhausted”. “Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different” (Albert Szent Gyorgi).