Stimulating design team creativity based on emotional values: A study on idea generation in the early stages of new product development processes

Creative ideas are essential for the generation of original ideas ultimately leading to innovation. The process of generating creative ideas can be enhanced by providing stimuli to a design team. However, implementing these stimuli can be a time consuming and complex process, limiting the practicality of this strategy. On the other hand, a large number of approaches have been proposed to deal with the consumers' emotions and, although substantial research has been carried out in this area, no academic references related to emotional stimuli for creativity could be found in the literature. In view of this, a question is raised: would easy-to-use and prescribed emotional stimuli for creativity enhance the generation of ideas when compared to traditional brainstorming? This paper outlines a method developed to encourage a design team to be inspired by human emotions while generating ideas for a product portfolio. To reach this goal, a set of emotional stimuli for creativity, named 'emotriggers', were created. The proposed method was applied in a set of experiments to validate the effectiveness of emotional stimuli for creativity, evaluating the ideas generated based on four criteria: quantity, quality, variety and novelty. As a result, the emotriggers were shown to help generate ideas, improving all of the four metrics, and the method received positive feedback from team members on its practicality.