Dealing with requirements: Influences on Idea Generation in the Early Stages of Product Development

This paper aims at identifying factors which influence the number of ideas generated during a brainstorming meeting as part of an industrial mechanical engineering design project. A framework for describing groups of influencing factors and their relationships is used. As a result of an explorative, comparative protocol analysis of two design meetings the influence of some factors is described e.g. the formulation of the design task description and the sequence of the process steps.