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2007 | Buch

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Creative Environments

Issues of Creativity Support for the Knowledge Civilization Age

herausgegeben von: Andrzej P. Wierzbicki, Yoshiteru Nakamori

Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

Buchreihe : Studies in Computational Intelligence

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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Über dieses Buch

"Creative Environments" is a follow-up on the book Creative Space in the same series and by the same authors, serving this time as editors of a broader book on computational intelligence and knowledge engineering tools for supporting knowledge creation. This book contains four parts. The first part presents a further development of models of knowledge creation presented already in Creative Space, in particular the Triple Helix of normal academic knowledge creation and a new, integrated model of normal academic and organizational knowledge creation, called Nanatsudaki (seven waterfalls) Model. The second part presents computational intelligence tools for knowledge acquisition by machine learning and data mining, for debating, brainstorming, for roadmapping and for integrated support of academic creativity. The third part presents the use of statistics for creativity support, virtual laboratories, gaming and role playing for creativity support, methods of knowledge representation and multiple criteria aggregation, distance and electronic learning. The last part addresses knowledge management and philosophical issues and contains chapters: on management of technology and knowledge management for academic R and D; on knowledge management and creative holism or systems thinking in the knowledge age; on technology and change or the role of technology in knowledge civilisation; on the emergence of complex concepts in science; and the final chapter on summary and conclusions, including a proposal of an integrated episteme of constructive evolutionary objectivism, necessary for the knowledge civilization age.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Basic Models of Creative Processes

Frontmatter

1. Preliminaries

We decided to write and edit this book – a cooperative effort, involving two main authors and more than 20 co-authors – in order to show how the micro-theories of knowledge creation, developed and elaborated in the book Creative Space, can contribute to a further development of Creative Environments, of a contemporary infrastructure for creativity, including both business-oriented creativity at companies and science-oriented creativity in academia. Before we explain the concept of Creative Environments in more detail, we must recall some conclusions from Creative Space and comment on our reflections since the publication of that book.

Andrzej P. Wierzbicki, Yoshiteru Nakamori

2. Testing the Triple Helix Model

Knowledge discovery, possession, handling, and enhancement are issues of increasing importance and actuality in contemporary society. In order to sustain competitive competencies, new knowledge and technologies are required ever more quickly by individuals, organisations, even nations. Thus, the creation of knowledge and technology has attracted increasing attention in scientific research and practice. This attention is also explained by a shift of emphasis from purely knowledge management to innovation support, which requires even more concentration on creativity.

Jing Tian, Andrzej P. Wierzbicki, Hongtao Ren, Yoshiteru Nakamori

3. Knowledge Sciences and Jaist Nanatsudaki Model

This chapter is organised as follows. In these introductory remarks, we discuss also the divergence of the contemporary episteme and the need of a reflection on the contemporary situation in knowledge management, technology management, as well as the emergence of knowledge sciences. Then we discuss the issues of emerging knowledge sciences in more detail. We substantiate the need for a prescriptive synthesis of normal knowledge creation processes with diverse organisational knowledge creation processes and introduce the idea of the Nanatsudaki Model. Then we proceed to the more detailed description of the concept of the Nanatsudaki Model, followed by comments on its consecutive parts. We discuss the relation of the Nanatsudaki Model to the survey of knowledge creation support described in the preceding chapter and add conclusions.

Andrzej P. Wierzbicki, Yoshiteru Nakamori

Tools for Supporting Basic Creative Processes

Frontmatter

4. Knowledge Acquisition by Machine Learning and Data Mining

A critical problem in the development of knowledge-based systems is capturing knowledge from the experts. There are many knowledge elicitation techniques that might aid this process, but the fundamental problem remains: tacit knowledge that is normally implicit, inside the expert's head, must be externalised and made explicit. Knowledge acquisition (KA) thus has been well recognised as a bottleneck in the development of knowledgebased systems and is a key issue in knowledge engineering. Traditionally, KA techniques can be grouped into three categories: manual, semi-automated (interactive) and automated (machine learning (ML) and data mining). Since the early days of artificial intelligence (AI), the problem of KA, the elicitation of expert knowledge in building knowledge bases, has been recognised as a fundamental issue in knowledge engineering.

Tu Bao Ho, Saori Kawasaki, Janusz Granat

5. Creativity Support in Brainstorming

This chapter begins with a short review of the history of the concept of brainstorming. Models of the brainstorming process are recalled, including the counter-positions of group brainstorming and individual brainstorming. Existing software for brainstorming support is reviewed, with special attention paid to Japanese developments in this field. New development directions for brainstorming support are indicated; they mostly concern the issue of how to combine organisational knowledge creation with normal academic knowledge creation. Conclusions finalise the chapter.

Susumu Kunifuji, Naotaka Kato, Andrzej P. Wierzbicki

6. Debating and Creativity Support

Debate, or intersubjective deliberation, is one of the oldest and most basic human activities. It is much older and often essentially different than brainstorming, because the aim of debate is to critically select ideas that are useful. In China, it is often said “the more truth is debated, the clearer it becomes”; the objective of debate is to argue the matter out. The debate has long history in both West and East, especially in China; however, Western culture has concentrated more on the logical and rational aspects of thought, and less on its intuitive, preverbal, image-related aspects. In Occidental culture, debate is even taught as an important course in highschool education, because debate is considered to be one of the fundamental aspects of democracy (such as a parliamentary debate). It also has an extensive literature, starting with Plato and extending to contemporary eristic debate. Eristic and democratic debate concentrates, however, on the political aspects of convincing the audience that the adversary is not right.

Jifa Gu, Andrzej P. Wierzbicki

7. Creativity Support for Roadmapping

Today the term “roadmap” is used liberally by planners in many different types of communities. It appears to have a multiplicity of meanings, and is used in a wide variety of contexts: by commercial organizations, industry associations, governments, and academia, see, e.g., Kostoff and Schaller (2001). Perhaps the most widely accepted definition of a roadmap was given by Robert Galvin, former CEO of Motorola (Galvin 1998):

Tieju Ma, Jie Yan, Yoshiteru Nakamori, Andrzej P. Wierzbicki

8. Integrated Support for Scientific Creativity

Creative environments comprise the contemporary infrastructure of creativity, including both business-oriented creativity at companies and scienceoriented creativity in academia. Many companies today use diverse forms of knowledge management that aim to organize and aid the process of knowledge creation. However, future creative environments should go a step further: They should become tools for supporting creativity. To this end, these environments can utilize the findings of contemporary microtheories of knowledge creation (Wierzbicki and Nakamori 2006a).

Adam W. Wierzbicki, Hongtao Ren

Diverse Tools Supporting Creative Processes

Frontmatter

9. Statistics for Creativity Support

The main issue addressed by this chapter is an interpretation of statistics: is it just a functionalist set of tools for diverse measurements, or is it a toolbox for supporting creativity? We represent the latter opinion and try to describe our reasons for it.

This chapter is organised as follows. After these introductory remarks, we review the concept of statistics as the grammar of technology development. We follow with lessons from applications of statistical tools for quality control in Japan. Methods for the statistical design of experimentsand their importance in applications are reviewed. The extension of theseapproaches of statistical experiment design to support experimental research in scientific and technological laboratories is discussed. These tools of designing experiments can be also modified for application in virtual laboratories.

Hiroe Tsubaki, Andrzej P. Wierzbicki

10. Virtual Laboratories

The term virtual laboratory consists of two words that might appear, for many readers, to have contradictory characteristics. Thus, we shall first explain why we use this term.

A laboratory is most commonly understood as a place equipped for scientific research, experiments, and testing. Until the proliferation of Internet, a laboratory was associated with a work site (from a dedicated room to a complex of buildings) at a single location. At universities, laboratory also can mean either a practical component accompanying a lecture, or a classroom where practical demonstrations and exercises take place. Scientific laboratories (particularly in engineering, physics, chemistry, and medicine) are characterised by a controlled uniformity of procedures and conditions (such as cleanliness, temperature, humidity) as well as by sophisticated instruments necessary for advanced studies. Because laboratories have been considered a basic element supporting scientific research, the word laboratory also has acquired a metaphorical organisational meaning: it might refer to an elementary division of a scientific organisation, or a part of a faculty or a school devoted to a specific field of research. This metaphorical meaning is frequently used, for example, in Japanese universities. In this chapter we discuss the meaning of a laboratory in its more traditional sense. However, in all these situations the word laboratory is commonly associated with being a real place as well as being thoroughly defined and organised.

Marek Makowski, Andrzej P. Wierzbicki

11. Gaming and Role Playing as Tools for Creativity Training

This chapter comments on the concept and process of gaming (including role playing), leading to the perception of gaming and role playing as tools for creativity training. In these introductory remarks, we comment on the history and diverse roles of gaming in the era of knowledge civilisation and the time of virtual reality. We turn then to trends observed in the development of three interrelated fields: gaming, negotiations, and game theory, with their tendency to increasing specialisation, and comment on the need for an interdisciplinary, open, and informed systemic synthesis. Next we discuss the increasingly broad and intensively developed field of gaming applications used today for the purpose of training business managers; we postulate that the goal of such training is to accelerate the formation of business intuition and thus can be considered as creativity training. We turn then to the possibility of using gaming and negotiations for problem solving and idea formation, exploiting the strong motivation provided by role playing, on an example of simulated negotiations and the related theory of coalition games. The chapter is summarised by conclusions.

Mina Ryoke, Andrzej P. Wierzbicki

12. Knowledge Representation and Multiple Criteria Aggregation

This chapter returns to the issues of knowledge acquisition for creativity support addressed in Chap. 4, this time from a more theoretical, mathematical perspective. The chapter is organised as follows. In these introductory remarks, we discuss diverse types of knowledge and the need for knowledge representation; then we turn to a discussion of formal models of knowledge representation. Then several meanings of the concept of knowledge integration are presented, distinguishing expert-based intuitive integration from computer-based automatic integration. Examples of existing approaches to the integration of knowledge are given. In particular, multiple criteria approaches to knowledge acquisition and integration, including new trends and solutions, are presented.

Wieslaw Traczyk, Andrzej P. Wierzbicki, Van Nam Huynh

13. Distance and Electronic Learning

This chapter first discusses the concepts of distance and electronic learning and teaching and their historical background, then addresses the role of such learning and teaching in the new knowledge civilisation era: to alleviate regional development disparities and digital as well as generational divides on one hand and to change the recording medium of the intellectual heritage of humanity on the other. The interdisciplinary and information science aspects of distance and electronic learning are reviewed. Current achievements and trends in electronic learning (called also e-learning) are presented, together with an integrated learning model concept especially focused on practical applications in business organisations. The impacts of market development on these trends and achievements, as well as problems that might escape market development but nevertheless should be addressed, are discussed. Current trends and problems with multimedia technology when applied to the record of academic activities and to electronic books are reviewed. As a more specific illustration or case study, the developments of intelligent learning support, together with current trends and problems of individualising teaching and learning, are discussed in more detail. The chapter ends with concluding remarks: Broadening the field of electronic teaching applications to include creativity support in electronic and distance learning is suggested.

Toshiya Ando, Piotr Górczynski, Andrzej P. Wierzbicki

Knowledge Management and Philosophical Issues of Creativity Support

Frontmatter

14. Management of Technology in Academic Research

This chapter describes the concept of management of technology (MOT) and the attempts to apply this concept in academic research, to support research and education in the university laboratories at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST).

The concept of MOT became popular in European countries and the United States starting in the 1980s, and has made rapid strides in Japan since 2002. MOT can have diverse definitions, but here we examine it as an education programme aimed at enhancing the management abilities of technologists responsible for research and development in corporations; such a programme is usually taught at graduate schools in the management and engineering areas. These MOT courses and programmes are mainly targeted at corporate employees, and their primary mission, as recognised by faculty members in charge of them, is to respond to the needs of research and development divisions in profit-making organisations.

Toshiya Kobayashi, Yoshiteru Nakamori, Andrzej P. Wierzbicki

15. Knowledge Management and Creative Holism in the Knowledge Age

Knowledge is regarded as one of the key determinant factors of a firm's, industry's, or country's survival and growth in the knowledge age. Unlike Drucker, who considered knowledge as the key resource, we now believe other factors, such as the business environment or political factors are just as important as knowledge to firms, industries, and countries. As a matter of fact, we believe that the configuration of various factors as a whole determines the performance of a firm or industry. Or in systems terms: A whole can be greater than, equal to, or perhaps lesser than the sum of its parts. Therefore, knowledge management requires an interdisciplinary study to critically and continuously “sweep in” “new” ideas, approaches, models, and techniques in an informed manner, in both theory and practice, to pursue the notion that a whole is greater than the sum of its parts from the perspective of critical systems thinking (Jackson 2000, 2003, 2005; Gao et al. 2003). To do so, chief knowledge officers (CKOs) and knowledge-related practitioners must also understand the meaning of knowledge and the

Fei Gao, Yoshiteru Nakamori

16. Technology and Change: The Role of Technol ogy in the Knowledge Civilization Era

This chapter presents a reflection on the role of technology in the era of knowledge civilization. Diverse perceptions of this era, the concepts of three civilization eras vs. three waves, of a conceptual platform vs. an episteme of a civilization era, of the major changes at the end of industrial civilization era are recalled. The deepening separation of the three spheres of technology, hard science, and social science/humanities is discussed. Upon reflection, it is shown that this separation results from the widely diverging episteme of these three cultural spheres. The contemporary philosophy of technology is briefly reviewed; it is shown that some of its writings disregard the opinions of technologists even when it comes to defining technology. The danger of misunderstandings resulting from such diverging opinions is stressed.

Andrzej P. Wierzbicki

17. The Emergence of New Concepts in Science

As we begin this chapter let us recall the distinction between the microand macro-changes in science, as discussed in Chap. 1 of this volume and in the book Creative Space (Wierzbicki and Nakamori 2006a). As we know, there is no direct connection in time between revolutionary changes in technology and macro-changes in science. For example, Guttenberg's printing technique or Watt's development of the steam-engine, both revolutionary from a technological point of view, did not require any simultaneous revolutionary change in science. However, it would not have been possible to develop modern digital computer technology without previous macrochanges in science, such as the emergence of quantum mechanics. Also, it would not have been possible to make an expedition to the Moon without the prior Copernican or Newtonian scientific revolutions.

Zbigniew Król

18. Summary and Conclusions

This chapter is the concluding part of this book and is organised in three substantive sections. We deal first with a summary of the diverse contributions to the theory of knowledge creation processes and to the development of creative environments supporting such processes presented in Parts I, II, III and IV of the book. Then we turn to the basic epistemological issue arising from these contributions and from the discussions in Part IV: the divergence of the episteme of the three cultural spheres of hard and natural sciences, technology and social sciences with humanities implies the need to create a new, integrated episteme in the era of knowledge civilisation. Finally, we add some concluding remarks.

Andrzej P. Wierzbicki, Yoshiteru Nakamori

Backmatter

Titel: Creative Environments
herausgegeben von: Andrzej P. Wierzbicki
Yoshiteru Nakamori
Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-540-71562-7
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-71466-8
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71562-7

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