Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
261633 Design Studies 2013 21 Pages PDF
Abstract

Systematically developing innovative products demands effective idea generation methods. The effectiveness can be verified based on a set of metrics, of which the variety metric is one. It is demonstrated that this metric exhibits several shortcomings, such as the lack of level-based measurements, and arbitrarily defined level weights. The currently applied variety metrics, furthermore, do not measure the degree of uniformness of the distribution of ideas over nodes on an abstraction level. A level-based, correctly normalized variety metric which accounts for the degree of uniformness of the distribution of concepts over nodes, is proposed, and is shown to resolve the above issues.

► A correctly scaling level-based idea space variety metric is proposed. ► The proposed variety metric accounts for the degree of uniformness of ideas. ► The proposed variety metric is monotonically increasing.

Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Computer Science Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
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