Better than brainstorming? Potential contextual boundary conditions to brainwriting for idea generation in organizations

Abstract

Organizations and societies all need good, useful ideas to survive and prosper. People often enjoy brainstorming, though it is not as productive as they tend to believe. Groups can potentially generate more and better ideas when ‘brainwriting’; that is, silently sharing written ideas in a time‐ and sequence‐structured group format. This conceptual paper identifies likely boundary conditions to the promising findings from brainwriting laboratory research generalizing to real‐world organizational contexts. Important dimensions of organizational context may be revealed by drawing on the journalistic principle to examine what, who, when, where, and why certain outcomes result from particular organizational practices (Johns, 2006). Multiple potential contextual moderators are suggested in each of these five areas. Subsequent field research will inform the idea‐generation literature as well as those concerned with eliciting high‐quality, useful ideas to address particular organizational and societal challenges.

Success Factors for PDCA as Continuous Improvement Method in Product Development

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A methodological proposal to assist scenario-based design in the early stages of innovation projects

“…Our reasons for choosing these methods are specified below. Brainwriting is expected to improve fluency with respect to Osborn's standard brainstorming rules, for numerous reasons (Heslin, 2009): it prevents production blocking by forcing group members to communicate in written form, using different-coloured inks. This reduces the risks related to sharing ideas in a turn-based medium (e.g.…”

Interaction effects of Personality and Gender on Brain writing creativity and emotional Intelligence in Fostering Peacebuilding Skills among Nigerian adolescents

“…Based on the findings of this study and ample research evidence (Coskun, 2005;Heslin, 2009;Kohn, Paulus, & Choi, 2011;Tsai, 2015) pointing to the fact that human behaviour, outcomes and achievements are directly influenced by their levels of creative and emotional learning competencies, it is thus recommended that schools, workplace, governmental bodies, research, training and academic institutions make it a point of duty to include creativity and emotional intelligence training programmes in their training curricular. These skills are essentials to handling anger, managing conflicts, developing empathy, and controlling impulses and ultimately fostering peace among faculty, work groups/teams and community members.…”