Trends within Creativity Support Tools

The importance for the generation of new, innovative, technical products has increased significantly in recent years. This derives from an increase in competition. However, the development of innovative, technical products is time-consuming and depends to a certain level on the creativity of engineers. CSTs can help product developers to be more creative within the development and design task and can support them all along the product development process. Furthermore, such tools can enable remote collaboration to fit within the future challenges of new product development.
In this paper, a comprehensive examination of over 900 creativity-related publications from the ACM Digital Library and ScienceDirect Library, using a keyword search, is conducted. The results show an overview of identified tools based on criteria proposed in the paper. The analysis is used to identify trends of CSTs for future technical product development, regarding especially aspects of local and remote collaboration. These trends show current development activities as well as existing fields of action for CSTs within technical product development, to further increase creativity.