Abductive reasoning

Paper: The Language of Abduction in Choosing Innovation
A. Dong, R. Mounarath and D. Lovallo, 2nd International Conference on Design Creativity (ICDC2012)

Abstract: The selection of an  innovation project to take forward for product development, is
a complex, strategic, managerial decision which shares one key part with concept ideation and
evaluation in design: assessing creativity. This problem is especially pronounced for products
that  do not yet exist or have never been mass-marketed. In this paper, we go beyond the
question of how to select or identify the most creative project to  consider the following: How
can this decision be affected by forms of logical reasoning? Through a qualitative content
analysis of committees selecting an innovation project to take forward, we show how forms of
logical reasoning have an impact on the assessment of creativity and can alter the
characterization of whether a project is creative or not.

Notes:

1. Definitions: "Deduction is a form of logical reasoning from a premise and an observation leading to a conclusion... Induction is a general principle derived from observations... Abduction is the most likely explanation for a set of observations"
2. Interesting: "The literature is nearly silent on how these forms of reasonins might appear in natural language"
3. The authors review 12 groups of 5 participants who reviewed (committee deliberation) 7 final year capstone design studio projects (Design Computing at USYD)
4. The projects evaluated have "similar levels of technical feasibility, novelty and potential customer value" (but this assessment remains implicit)
5. "In abductive framing, the committee... attempts to explain through questioning, proposing or hypothesizing the conditions of possibility for the existence of the product"
6. Conclusion: "We do not prescribe abduction as the preferred mode of reasoning in choosing innovation; rather, we point out that the determination of the innovation projects is altered by the form of logical reasoning"

Read next: V. Krishnan and Karl T. Ulrich. 2001. Product Development Decisions: A Review of the Literature.Manage. Sci. 47, 1 (January 2001), 1-21.