Development of a PDA based idea collecting system and its application to an idea generation consistent support system

We have developed an idea collecting software, called GMemo running on a personal digital assistant (IBM WorkPad). Users can collect and input ideas in free hand writing using GMemo immediately in anytime and anywhere, and use ideas as data for GUNGEN (GroUpware for a New idea GENeration consistent support system) directly. Nine persons have used GMemo for five months. The results of the application of GMemo show that a total of 290 pieces of data were collected and the mean value of characters in one idea was about 26, which was nearly the same as the conventional method of collecting ideas by paper media (e.g. post-it notes). We performed KJ method (one of the famous idea generation method in Japan) twice from collected data and the results of them were similar to those of the conventional KJ method