A Cognitive Ideation Support Framework using IBM Watson Services

Ideas generation is a core activity for innovation in organizations. The creativity of the generated ideas depends not only on the knowledge retrieved from the organizations' knowledge bases, but also on the external knowledge retrieved from other resources. Unfortunately, organizations often cannot efficiently utilize the knowledge in the knowledge bases due to the limited abilities of the search and retrieval mechanisms especially when dealing with unstructured data. In this paper, we present a new cognitive support framework for ideation that uses the IBM Watson DeepQA services. IBM Watson is a Question Answering system which mimics human cognitive abilities to retrieve and rank information. The proposed framework is based on the Search for Ideas in the Associative Memory (SIAM) model to help organizations develop creative ideas through discovering new relationships between retrieved data. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed system, the generated ideas generated are selected and assessed using a set of established creativity criteria.