This book Integrated Creative Problem Solving (iCPS) is the second book in the Delft Studies on Innovating series. This series is intended to give innovation and design reseachers related to the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering of the Delft University of Technology a platform to share their knowledge with a wider audience. The first book is The Delft Innovation Method, which was published in March 2012. Creativity is one of the building blocks of that first book. Therefore is seems logical to have the second book of the series to go into details about creativity, creative problem solving and organizing creative sessions. The central theme of this book is integration. In our approach we like to integrate people and process, process and techniques, techniques with content, ideas with implementation and all together there should be commitment and fun. iCPS is shown at its best in the way we like to have creative sessions been organized and runned smoothly. The organizer, we call such a specialist the Creative Facilitator, will be using creativity techniques with a group of volunteering other professionals to dive into a process to solve a serious problem of a Problem Owner.
The metaphor we use for this Creative Facilitator is that of a juggler. S/he is playing with cones or balls (lookalikes for ideas) together with the audience. During the play the balls can change into cones or cubes, the weight and the materials will change, as well as the stickyness of the surfaces of the cones, the cubes and the balls. And during all these unexpected changes the show must go on. Integration for this juggler means balancing all the different aspects of the process of creative problem solving.