Where the Best and Worst Ideas Come From

Finding the most effective way to brainstorm is easier once you figure out what you want to get out of the process. In particular, there are structural differences between the kind of brainstorming session that will generate one great idea and the type that will produce several above-average concepts, according to a new study.

The study’s findings are described in a January 2008 working paper, titled Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea, coauthored by Karan Girotra, an assistant professor of technology and operations management at INSEAD and by two professors from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania: Christian Terwiesch, associate professor of operations and information management and Karl T. Ulrich, CIBC Professor of Operations and Information Management. “The front end of the ideation stage is very important,” notes Girotra. “But companies are not as structured or as rigorous about this phase of the research and development process. Management tends to focus its attention on the later stages.” Those later stages are indeed critical — and expensive — but managers needn’t risk getting that far with a subpar idea. No matter how well conducted the back end of the innovation process may be, it cannot elevate a fundamentally low-quality idea.

Perhaps it’s natural for managers to assume that idea gathering cannot be codified. After all, some of the most celebrated discoveries and inventions — from penicillin to 3M’s Post-it Notes — have been the offspring of serendipity. But in a business environment where many product development techniques have been commoditized, or even outsourced, Girotra observes that the idea generation and selection process may be the last remaining source of competitive advantage.

Studying brainstorming is hardly a new concept. But existing research often turns fuzzy when it comes to evaluating the quality of the thinking that results from various types of brainstorming methods. Why? It turns out that brainstorming groups “are very bad at evaluating ideas,” according to Terwiesch. “Certain members will get hung up on certain ideas, and often there is a strong personality whose opinion will dominate.” To avoid such dynamics, the researchers decided to give responsibility for generating ideas and for assessing them to two separate groups. After a group came up with new product ideas on a given topic, researchers entered the ideas into a Web-based system and then asked as many as 20 outside experts for their subjective assessment of the concepts. Previous studies have focused on the quantity of a group’s brainstorming output, rather than judging its quality. But, as Girotra notes, “when it comes to innovation, the extremes are what matter — not the norm and not the average.”

In the study, two distinct types of brainstorming groups generated ideas. One type followed the traditional model, assembling a group of people (in this case, students studying product design) and having them come up with product ideas that would be appropriate for, say, dorm rooms. The other group took a “hybrid” approach, combining individual and teamwork. Those students worked on ideas by themselves before coming together to share their thinking.

Which technique yielded the best ideas? Strictly speaking, the traditional brainstorming groups consistently came up with the very best idea — and the very worst one, too. In other words, the quality of their results varied much more than those that came out of the hybrid groups that combined individual and group idea generation. However, the hybrid groups produced more ideas that were, on average, of higher quality. Nonetheless “for the very best idea, you need to have a pure brainstorming group,” notes Girotra. “Random interactions are likely to produce better-quality ideas.”

Unfortunately, such brainstorming teams have a natural weakness when it comes to recognizing the best ideas they’ve come up with. The ability to evaluate ideas well “is compromised in a group, where members are more likely to want to second the boss,” observes Terwiesch. Meanwhile, when it comes to sheer quantity of ideas generated, the hybrid group easily outpaced the purely group process — where participants, after all, had to spend a bigger chunk of their time listening to others as opposed to coming up with their own ideas. If the same amount of time is available to both groups, the traditionally organized brainstorming team “significantly outperforms” the hybrid process when it comes to producing the best ideas, the report says.

That finding contradicts most existing literature on the subject, which concludes that working alone is most effective for idea generation, while working as a team is most satisfying. “What we found makes sense, since the most successful creative firms do mostly use team processes for brainstorming,” notes Terwiesch. “We just brought some new thinking to the subject.”

For more information, download the paper at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1082392. Contact the authors at karan.girotra@insead.edu, terwiesch@wharton.upenn.edu or ulrich@wharton.upenn.edu.