101 Activities For Teaching Creativity And Problem Solving

146 101 Activities for Teaching Creativity and Problem Solving

30. Parts Is Parts

Background

Sometimes creativity is a hit-or-miss proposition. Random stimuli may

or may not spark ideas. Free associations are relatively unpredictable.

You really don’t know how you’ll respond to a particular stimulus

until you encounter it. Then, once you respond, you don’t know if the

resulting ideas will be winners.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this. Unpredictability

keeps things interesting and makes the occasional hot idea all the

more exciting. There are times, however, when you might want to

generate ideas a little more systematically. That’s where Parts Is

Parts might help.

Parts Is Parts is based on the “Heuristic Ideation Technique (HIT)” developed by

Edward Tauber (1972). It generates ideas by creating heuristics or rules of thumb. (A rule

of thumb is a guideline that increases the chances of achieving a certain outcome.)

Heuristics then are used to structure the idea generation process.

Tauber believes that heuristics can make idea generation more efficient and ensure that

only the best idea candidates will be considered. Although HIT originally was intended

for new product idea generation, it also will work for a variety of other problems.

Two heuristics help make idea generation more efficient. The first assumes that most

ideas can be described using a two-word combination. For instance, the words

“toaster/tart” represent a combination that might suggest a breakfast food product. The

second heuristic is that some combinations will be viewed as more interesting than oth-

ers. In particular, combinations that come from different categories have a greater chance

of suggesting unique ideas than combinations from similar categories. As an example, the

combination “ice cream/cereal” might be perceived as more interesting than the combi-

nation “vegetables/fruits.”

Objectives

• To help participants generate as many creative ideas as possible


• To help participants learn how to use the activities to generate ideas

Participants

Small groups of four to seven people each

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