A-Posteriori Novelty Metrics Based on Idea Decomposition

Novelty assessment procedures based on a-posteriori rationales are often used to extract useful information about creativity and/or idea generation effectiveness. In this context, the metric proposed by Shah and colleagues in 2003 (SNM), is one of the most used in design research. However, scholars highlighted some non-negligible flaws and also possible variants have been proposed, claimed to improve the original version. The aim of this paper is to perform a systematic literature review about the SNM variants, in order to verify whether the acknowledged flaws of the metric have been overcome or not. As a result, this paper highlights that the problems affecting the original SNM version have not been comprehensively resolved, and the different variants proposed in literature can even present some additional flaws. Accordingly, a comprehensive list of pros and cons of the reviewed metrics has been reported, thus providing fundamental information to support accurate metric selection.