How to generate creative ideas for innovation: a hybrid approach of WordNet and morphological analysis

•We suggest WordNet-based morphology analysis to enhance creative ideation.•The hierarchical relationship of WordNet fits the morphology analysis.•Meronyms and holonyms are employed for dimension construction of morphology.•Hyponyms and hypernyms are used for value construction of morphology.•A system is developed for supporting the WordNet-based morphological analysis.

A creative ideation process occupies a substantial part of the innovation process. Among many techniques for ideation, morphology analysis has been employed as a prevalent method, whose success is critically affected by its dimensions and values. Despite the gravity of determining dimensions and values, previous literature has been simply subject to manual construction by some experts, which leads to significant subjectivity and bias in morphology building. For this reason, an analytic and objective way of morphology building is highly required. In response, this paper suggests a new way of morphology building to enhance creative ideation using WordNet. WordNet is a large lexical database of English, which provides a hierarchical network dictionary of words. WordNet's hierarchical relationship characteristic fits morphology analysis as its nature comes from a hierarchical structure of dimensions and values. The use of WordNet can be an excellent remedy for morphology building by employing two types of relationships: meronym/holonym for dimension construction and hyponym/ hypernym for value construction. Since dimension construction extends the contents of horizontal axis of morphology, it is called horizontal extension. Similarly, value construction extends the contents of vertical axis of morphology, thus it is referred to as vertical extension of morphology.