What team characteristics generate surplus creativity during a cocreation session? What circumstances enable us to attain such a surplus? How can we form a team that guarantees achieving expected creativity surplus? VO Group, UCLouvain and Sirris have focused specifically on these questions within the framework of the R&D PICesc project.
VO Group is a Brussels-based company reuniting six active agencies in the communication sector. They have developed extensive expertise in participative methodology thanks to their VO Lab. The lab assists VO’s clients throughout their innovation process, by mobilising - over 4-hour sessions - a group of creative profiles with varying expertise and outlooks, in order to generate ideas and solutions likely to satisfy their future needs and challenges.
VO Lab adopts a dynamic and structured approach, propitious to provoking cocreation and collective intelligence. Its methodology pays particular attention to cocreativity tools and teams. This approach offers the guarantee that a whole range of perspectives are considered, hence prompting the emergence of both novel and useful ideas for a given context.
During its cocreation sessions, VO Lab strives to find the perfect combination of people and profiles that are capable of conceiving creative solutions in response to a given issue, and to define the associated tools/exercises to bring such solutions to fruition. To ensure their research relies on a solid and reproducible scientific basis, VO Group called upon Sirris. Together, they defined an R&D project concept enabling such questions to be approached, inviting the UCLouvain LouRIM research institute to join the project.
UCLouvain’s LouRIM institute specialises in the study of organisations and their societal challenges, approached via different angles, such as entrepreneurship, marketing, innovation and IT. Within the context of this project, LouRIM focused on profile combination modelling, tools likely to stimulate creativity and the right circumstances to profitably exploit them. Sirris’ EluciDATA Lab provided its expertise in data processing and artificial intelligence to determine the right approaches for the (semi-)automatic composition of teams and useful tool sets for cocreation sessions, based on matchmaking. Finally, as a project initiator, VO Group looked after the accessibility of appropriate data sets for research and result validation within a prototype platform for composing cocreation teams.
Matchmaking
To find a solution for (semi-)automatic team composition and tool set identification, Sirris focused initially on characterisation and profiling among individuals likely to participate in a cocreation session (contributors), together with the tools they could use to coordinate the discussion. For contributors and tools are precisely the two types of entity that need to be matched with a cocreation session request. We used standard feature engineering approaches to define contributor and tool set types.
Then, to compose teams, we looked at several approaches for matching the aforementioned entities. The challenge lay in the heterogeneous nature of these entities and the fact that the desired result was, itself, composed of a combination of contributor and tool set types. We drew inspiration from pattern mining research techniques and hierarchical agglomerative clustering, to propose a range of approaches for the session organiser to compose their team.
The PICesc project was funded by Innoviris, the public organisation that supports and funds research and innovation in the Brussels-Capital Region.
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