The Effects of Forced Customer-Oriented Ideation on Technical Experts

This paper aims to get exploratory deeper understanding towards actual difficulties and benefits on customer-oriented ideation process through an online half day design-thinking workshop experiment with22 in-house technical experts in a major Japanese manufacturing enterprise. The workshop consists two ideation parts; free ideation and forced customer-oriented ideation. In addition, all ideas from both ideations were evaluated by judges after the workshop. Through an analysis of answers from questionnaires collected at the workshop and evaluation points of ideas, four tendencies regarding actual difficulties and benefits on customer-oriented ideation process were caught. First, devising ideas in the customer-oriented ideation was more difficult for the participants than the free ideation. Second, proposing improvement ideas for others in the customer-oriented ideation was more difficult for the participants than the free ideation. Third, the participants feel that they could get better improvement ideas from others on the customer-oriented ideation rather than the free ideation. Fourth, Target customers were better defined and the existence of the needs seems more realistic in forced customer-oriented idea planning than free idea planning. This study tries to get to the bottom of the reason why customer-oriented ideation is difficult as well as show what the benefits such ideation has.