The project website of the Ideas to Market project is now launched.

Traditional ideation processes are often based on qualitative data generated in co-creation workshops. However, more recently, collaborative ideation platforms, i.e., large-scale online platforms for generating ideas, have shown a remarkable success so far. Leveraging the crowd allows the generation of a large number of ideas. The heterogeneity of the crowd increases the potential for a high diversity of ideas due to participants' different backgrounds. However, finding valuable ideas is challenging for two reasons: first, the crowd often generates mundane and repetitive ideas and, second, the large amount of ideas generated by the crowd makes it unfeasible to check them manually.

Together with the Fraunhofer Center of Sustainable Research and Innovation and the Leibniz Institute for Knowledge Media, we research these new forms of idea generation in the context of knowledge transfer. The overarching goal of the project is, to generate ideas for applying new technologies in different contexts, and evaluate their market potential.

In the context of the BMBF-funded research project "Ideas to Market", the HCC group addresses these challenges by algorithmically augmenting human's creativity to overcome mundane ideas and by annotating ideas semantically, to analyze them automatically. We, therefore, have developed a number of software solutions, namely:

1. Greenhouse: A system that allows to create and manage brainstorming sessions for crowdsourcing
2. Orchard: A software to cluster and organize ideas on a digital whiteboard
3. Kaleidoscope: An interactive visualisation of idea spaces based on RDF data and a tagging/marking mechanism

All software and data will be open sourced soon.