(33d) Improvisation Techniques for Chemical Process Innovation

The importance of creativity in technical innovation has been strongly emphasized by commercial, educational and government organizations. Such organizations include the National Academy of Engineering and the National Science Foundation. While numerous protocols for design and trouble-shooting have been developed, they typically ignore the creative act within the innovation process. This is likely due to the systematic approach typically employed by engineers in developing such processes. While these protocols are effective at organizing the appropriate concepts, constraints and resources to tackle design and trouble-shooting challenges, they do little to catalyze the creative act in innovation. Recognizing that a more chaotic search through idea space can improve innovation, the application of techniques used in humorous improvisation has catalyzed innovation in non-technical areas. The equivalence of humor and innovation has long been recognized by Arthur Koestler and Edward de Bono. However, we hypothesize that the relative lack of success for this approach in technical areas is due to the additional constraints on feasible innovative technical ideas.

Our approach is based on the equivalence of humorous improvisation for searching idea space and stochastic simulation for searching physical state space.[1] Humorous improvisation is used as a random idea generator, just as random number generators can produce random moves in physical state space. However, the state distribution bias used in stochastic simulation is lacking in humorous improvisation and our recent efforts have focused on developing this equivalent biasing in the searching of idea space. Such a biasing would cause our improvisation protocol to slowly evolve to produce unique and unpredictable innovative technical ideas just as physical stochastic simulations evolve to a unique unpredictable state distribution. Such processes, in which simple stochastic elements produce unpredictable complex behavior, are called emergent processes. Simulations are valuable precisely because such unique complex behavior emerges from such simple simulation elements. Sawyer has recognized that creative ideas emerge from simple group improvisation elements in much the same way.[2] Recognizing the emergent nature innovation from improvisation helps in assessing creativity. Because true innovation is a rare event, it is difficult assess. However, the emergent nature of this process means that innovation is not a single random new idea, but an idea that emerges from a scaffold of ideas build by the group. We are planning to assess the effectiveness of this method by measuring the progress of such a scaffold.

This approach has been applied in various exercises with academic and professional engineering groups and feedback has been taken in the form of post-exercise questionnaires and videotaping of the improvisation sessions. The exercises were carried out by the authors who represent a unique combination of experience in science, engineering, humor, improvisation and educational psychology. We will discuss the results of these exercises and characterize what best practices have been derived from these results. The specific application of this improvisation technique to the chemical process industry will also be discussed.

[1] Ludovice, P.; Lefton, L.; Catrambone, R. ?Improvisation for Engineering Innovation,? Proc. ASEE National Meeting, Louisville, KY, Paper AC-2010-1650, 2010.

[2] Sawyer, R.K. ?Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration?, Basic Books: New York, 2007.