イノベーション教育学会 第4回年次大会

Innovation workshop was widely adopted for generating innovative ideas. Analogical thinking is an important method for idea creation. The superficial similarity and structural similarity were crucial deciding the appropriateness of an analogy (Kim, 2015). However to make an analogy with low superficial similarity is thought to be difficult. So this study mainly focused on enhancing the participants’ performance in superficial similarity. 
This study focused on group communication’s influence on participants’ idea generation performance in terms of superficial similarity, including verbal communication and non-verbal communication. For verbal communication, communication content and utterance function, i.e. what was said and how it was said between the participants where influence occurred seems to be essential in face to face group-work setting. And group atmosphere is said to be influential for creating new ideas, therefore in this study the level of smile was checked for measuring the atmosphere. 
Experiment workshops were conducted for this study. After the workshop, interview was conducted with every participants mainly aiming at identifying their thinking process when creating statements. Latent Sematic Analysis was adopted to evaluate the superficial similarity of analogy. We found 5 influences might be helpful facilitating retrieval of source objects, including image transfer, domain transfer, forming a search cue by having more confidence, forming a search cue by becoming able to view the problem in a difference perspective, and cognitive shift. Secondly, about the relationship between verbal communication and the influences, we found each influence was triggered by different mechanisms. Communication content and utterance function play important roles in these influences. Specifically, for achieving image transfer, frequently trying and comment on the transferred image might be helpful. And for domain transfer, using different images from the transferred domain facilitates the influence. Stating specific reason for supporting or countering when making comments might increase individual confidence that facilitates to find a search cue. Sharing different perspective about the understanding of the problem helps individual to create a new search cue as well. And meta-analysis on the task requirement can help participants to focus on analogy creation. Finally about non-verbal communication factor smile, the research results show that high level of smile in the workshop positively related with the occurrence of some influences resulting in improvement, including image transfer, domain transfer and finding a new search cue.