We cannot play 20 questions with creativity and innovation and win: the necessity of practice-based integrative research

1. The need for integrative design research

In engineering, we are concerned with addressing technical challenges with various consequences such as societal and environmental. In broader domains, we address challenges with all available means under similar constraints. The challenges are systemic with interfaces to other issues, embedded in a context that provides constraints and influences what may be a viable solution. In addressing challenges, engineers participate in transdisciplinary teams, exercising different modes of reasoning including design, creativity, system thinking, and critical thinking. These modes interact in different ways, as a complex system, leading to an emergent process that delivers the required solution. In a way, our challenges or what we, as researchers, seek to study, are ‘living things moving in a field (Editorial board of IJDCI, 2013)’.

While this description is integrative, holistic, requiring multiple perspectives to study, science has progressively turned into a collection of specialized fields, wherein each, further specialization has been exercised leading to difficulties to address challenges (Reich & Shai, 2012).

A primary justification for this specialization has been the explosion of knowledge and its complexity that requires deep expertise in specialized areas. But the risk that materialized is the creation of artificial boundaries between necessary elements of addressing real problems and reinforcing silos that hamper communication.

The International Journal on Design Creativity and Innovation (IJDCI) had the goal to broaden the boundaries for studying creativity and innovation beyond engineering as ‘living things moving in a field’. This was reflected in the statements of several editorial board members in the 2013 editorial (Editorial board of IJDCI, 2013):

Linda Candy: “I believe that a promising way forward lies in the possibilities offered by embedding research in the practitioner process – in what is known as ‘practice-based research.’”

Dorian Marjanovic: “Each of these terms may be a research topic on its own, but the goal should not be further subspecialization and granularity but the discussion of the whole.”

Petra Badke-Schaub: “In the past, research has established a variety of results, but there seems to be a gap between the amount of studies on creativity and the relevance in terms of transfer into practice …. … Another problem is that empirical research on creativity is often conceptualized as experimental research. Most of these studies are producing singular results standing alone and are hardly mirroring the complexity of the ‘real world.’ These results do not provide further insights to nurture the development of theories or application models on creativity and innovation.”

Bernard Yannou: “But one must not forget realities of companies because they are the first beneficiaries of the practical perspectives: getting effective methods in companies to develop ever more innovative products and services”.

My call in the 2013 editorial was to practice what we preach (Reich, 2017) concerning being innovative in managing IJDCI but now this call can apply to practice what we preached in the editorial as reflected above.

An analysis of the 41 papers published in IJDCI in 2019–2021 reveals that almost all focused on specific aspects mainly employing lab experiments, clearly not studying creativity and innovation as ‘living things moving in a field’. To elaborate on the potential consequence of this practice, let me go back 40 years before the IJDCI editorial to illustrate the problem of specialization through the careful analysis of Allen Newell – a pioneer in computer science, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence – three foundations used heavily in creativity and innovation studies. In 1973, Newell was asked to analyze psychology research papers presented in one important symposium. He titled his contribution ‘You can’t play 20 questions with nature and win’ (Newell, 1973). While acknowledging the contributions of the papers at the symposium, Newell commented that they lead to no breakthrough or consolidation of insight into psychology as a whole. Conducting experiments, finding interesting phenomena, and continuing with experiments to further elaborate on them do not translate to understanding better in some integrated fashion. This criticism subsequently led Newell to start his Soar project for modeling comprehensive cognitive behavior and to his book on Unified Theories of Cognition (Newell, 1994).¹ As we know today, Newell’s project did not deliver its anticipated outcome. While delving into the fate of this project is beyond the scope of this note, it is safe to state that attempting a more modest goal, aligned with the available tools of that time and exercising constant reflection, in forms mentioned later in this editorial, may have proven more successful.

2. Examples of integrative research

Translating Newell’s insight into creativity studies suggests that no local insight about some human behavioral phenomena leads to a holistic understanding. There is a limit to purely experimental research (Le Masson et al., 2013). We need to integrate knowledge across time, cases, uses, levels, etc.; the more we integrate the better we are positioned to create meaningful and useful contextualized knowledge about creativity and innovation.

Integration of methods and phenomena could be driven by theory (Le Masson et al., 2013). Theory-based research is a good general research practice (Cash, 2018; Hatchuel et al., 2018; Reich et al., 1999). In one integration effort, we used C-K theory (Hatchuel & Weil, 2009), a design theory that explains the appearance of new objects, to analyze ASIT, TRIZ, and other related methods, hence providing a unified perspective that supports better understanding as well as insight about improving creativity methods (Reich et al., 2012).

Another example of consolidation deals with studying creativity within the complete life cycle of development processes (Kolberg et al., 2014). The complete process design created the foundation and context that allowed successfully implementing express change management guided by using the ASIT creativity method and implementing its recommendation (Kolberg et al., 2007). Without embedding the use of ASIT in a complete process and knowledge management practices, it would have no chance to succeed. This study demonstrated that while it was harder than a lab experiment to conduct this long-term field study, its successful results would not be possible in a lab experiment, perhaps a counterintuitive result. Note further that while this was a high school student project, it was a long and intense project where students participated in an international competition (i.e. Trinity College International Fire Fighting Robot Contest in 2004) that included also university students and professional teams. The high school team reported in the study was the best among all teams and won 1^st place in its category!

Other, more general, and real industrial projects, not necessarily focused on creativity but included innovation, and employing holistic theory-driven design research were performed in the n-dim project (Subrahmanian et al., 1997; Reich et al., 1999). There, the whole approach was consolidating methods, capabilities, people, and associated infrastructure that co-evolved with design theory in response to real industrial challenges that were addressed in collaborative participatory research with Industry (further brief description appears in Appendix B of Subrahmanian et al., 2020).

A final example and another broader consolidation approach is based on using another theory whose origin is in the aforementioned n-dim project – PSI (Problem/Product, Social, Institutional, framework, Reich & Subrahmanian, 2020, 2022); PSI was used to model research studies and build an initially shared memory (Konda et al., 1992) of best research practices, that could support developing a community of practice (Reich & Subrahmanian, 2021, 2022). One of the research projects modeled was by Petersson and Lundberg (2018) who studied the development of ideation methods for a particular context, for design professionals, through carefully crafted action research. In the study, the research team with diverse stakeholders studied prior design practice and ideation methods and developed a new method. The method was prototyped and refined before placing it in practice. The study was missing the practical validation but an additional report included this aspect (Petersson & Lundberg, 2016). Altogether, this was a successful practice-based study. Using PSI, we modeled it and found an almost complete aligned PSI model that we consider as a prerequisite to a successful research project. An even more aligned research study was reported by Schønheyder and Nordby (2018); using part of its research plan, could have improved Petersson and Lundberg’s (2018) study. We also modeled other design research studies whose PSI matrix was not aligned and this matched authors’ reports of (partial) failures of their research projects (Reich & Subrahmanian, 2021). Consequently, theory-based, practice-based design research could be guided to be successful and multiple such studies could be consolidated into a shared memory on creativity and innovation.

3. Moving toward comprehensive research programs

To provide a final PSI theory-based modeling example, consider Wrigley’s (2017) study of Design-Led Innovation (DLI) in several practical settings. A partial mapping of the issues covered by the proposed approach into PSI is shown in Table 1. It demonstrates that the author covered all the PSI matrix cells. The details of the entries as well as those not mapped here, reveal considerations of the alignment between the majority of these cells explicitly.

Table 1. Partial mapping of design-led innovation into PSI. Some sentences were copied verbatim from (Wrigley, 2017)

	P (problem/product)	S (social)	I (institutional)
	What are we addressing	Who is addressing	How is it addressed
Vision	What business are you in? Do you have a matching strategy?	Who are your stakeholders? Customer of tomorrow	Understand, reveal
Alignment	Do your current product and or service offerings help solve their biggest issue? Is your company still relevant? How do you shift your companies perspective from a YOU to a THEM approach? If you iterate the (propose, prototype, provoke) process what patterns of meaning are generated? Are you constantly challenging and seeking alternatives? Do they [alternatives] reflect the company strategy? What will need to change? How do you share your solutions with the company? How do you execute and integrate these learnings across the entire organization? Other questions that bridge between V and o levels from appendix A	Design-led innovation catalyst Reference to ‘you’ in appendix A	Ask, provoke, re-frame, design
Operation	What are the proposed assumptions? What are some solutions to the common patterns of meaning? What are the new product and service offerings?	Who are your stakeholders? What new capabilities do we need? Design champion Bring people along internally	Reveal, ask, Propose, prototype, provoke, re-frame, design, share Co-design (internally and then externally) By learning from the process and encouraging exploration in your employees your company will be most responsive to change Other design tools from appendix A

A closer examination of this study allows us not only to model the DLI approach to innovation which is the outcome or the model developed and validated in that research but also the PSI model of the research project plan itself, shown in Table 2, as we did with (Schønheyder & Nordby, 2018) study in (Reich & Subrahmanian, 2021). Here again, we see an almost aligned PSI matrix suggesting that this research will probably attain its goals. The model of the research plan and the model of its execution are also aligned. To go a step further, we can review subsequent papers by Wrigley to note that reflecting on this research led to a better understanding of how to supervise a group of design-led innovation catalysts (Wrigley et al., 2021) and how to develop design capability in organizations through action research (Price et al., 2021), which is a critical aspect of attaining sustainable creativity and innovation capability. Even though some issues such as the sustainability of the DLI catalysts role or the organizational design capabilities remained open, this could be further studied in future research and we could consider the research as a successful research program.

Table 2. PSI model of the research project. Some sentences were copied verbatim from (Wrigley, 2017)

	P (problem/product)	S (social)	I (institutional)
	What	Who	How
V	(1) explore the value of DLI to the business. (2) pilot the adoption of DLI within the business through an agreed pilot project. (3) contribute to the development of the learning community and share common challenges and strategies utilized to overcome barriers to DLI adoption	Researcher
A	What are the challenges, barriers and opportunities to adopting a DLI approach within organizations?	Researcher, design-led innovation catalysts	Regular consultations with the design-led innovation catalysts Cohort supervision (Wrigley et al., 2021) process of planning, acting and critically reflecting on the results
O	Plan of the action research as modeled in Table 1	Researcher, design-led innovation catalysts, Partnering organizations	Research timing plan DLI Catalyst Educational Framework DLI Lab provided a space for organizations to workshop ideas collectively, test new tools, share learnings, and explore the application of new knowledge to their industry project Action research

We could have also easily used PSI models of our research program (e.g. as appearing in Reich & Subrahmanian, 2019), or analyzed the research program of our collaborators on C-K theory (e.g. Hatchuel & Weil, 2009; Le Masson et al., 2010) to find aligned PSI matrices that reflect the success of these projects in fostering creativity and innovation in practice while co-evolving a design theory.

It is through comprehensive research programs that we can start gaining some practical knowledge about creativity and innovation as a whole. What we would recommend researchers engaged in such research programs is to provide occasional temporary closure of their research with some future developments to gain feedback and enlist collaborators. In our research, we can identify at least 3 such closures: (1) (Subrahmanian et al., 1997); (2) (Reich et al., 1999); and (3) (Reich & Subrahmanian, 2019, 2020; Subrahmanian et al., 2020).

4. Closure

If we practice what we preach to study creativity and innovation as ‘living things moving in a field’, and if we try to lead creativity research into the future, we need to not only state what should be the direction of research (what), but who is required to participate in these efforts and their required skills (who), how the research would be done, with which kind of practices, research tools, theories, etc. (how), and how all these are related to some vision for the field. One can study creativity in a practical context to improve practice and address grand challenges. One can equally study an isolated phenomenon to understand it, but such a set of 20 or more research questions does not accumulate to understand creativity as a whole or have a practical impact on creativity without a long-term program that finally ends with practice-based research. Researchers need to state such long-term research and follow it seriously in future studies. Researchers can use different theories or frameworks, such as PSI, to guide them in aligning all the ingredients of their research with their stated research vision.

5. Editorial note

This is a position paper written by an editorial board member with additional reflections on the inaugural editorial and insights into the evolution of design creativity and innovation research (Cascini et al., 2022).

Notes

1. I was a member of the Soar group with Allen Newell as a mentor and I lelf the project after understanding that it provides no added value to my own research question on learning design knowledge.