Providing Timely Examples Improves the Quantity and Quality of Generated Ideas

Abstract

Emerging online ideation platforms with thousands of example ideas provide an important resource for creative production. But how can ideators best use these examples to create new innovations? Recent work has suggested that not just the choice of examples, but also the timing of their delivery can impact creative outcomes. Building on existing cognitive theories of creative insight, we hypothesize that people are likely to benefit from examples when they run out of ideas. We explore two example delivery mechanisms that test this hypothesis: 1) a system that proactively provides examples when a user appears to have run out of ideas, and 2) a system that provides examples when a user explicitly requests them. Our online experiment (N=97) compared these two mechanisms against two baselines: providing no examples and automatically showing examples at a regular interval. Participants who requested examples themselves generated ideas that were rated the most novel by external evaluators. Participants who received ideas automatically when they appeared to be stuck produced the most ideas. Importantly, participants who received examples at a regular interval generated fewer ideas than participants who received no examples, suggesting that mere access to examples is not sufficient for creative inspiration. These results emphasize the importance of the timing of example delivery. Insights from this study can inform the design of collective ideation support systems that help people generate many high quality ideas.

Intelligent Systems to Support Large-Scale Collective Creative Idea Generation

“…We have explored two timing mechanisms: (1) participants can request ideas on demand, and (2) a system automatically infers when participants are stuck and provides ideas at that moment. Our results show that people who requested examples themselves generated the most novel ideas and people who received ideas automatically when idle produced the most ideas [8]. These results can inform the design of ideation support systems that aim to help people generate many high quality ideas.…”

“…The ideas people see and when they see them affect the ideas they generate [4,8]. An effective approach therefore should help a contributor find inspiring ideas from a large pool at an appropriate time.…”

Evaluating Digital Creativity Support To Improve Health-and-Safety in a Manufacturing Plant

“…Novelty and usefulness are established measures of creative ideas and products [18,23]. Different forms of creativity anticipate different degrees of novelty and/or usefulness, so models have emerged to distinguish between these different forms of creativity -often referred to as little-c and big-C creativity.…”

IdeaHound

“…For example, while exposure to mundane examples may hinder creativity [19,23], individuals can come up with more diverse and/or creative ideas if they have access to diverse and high quality inspirational examples [6,31,36,44,45,46]. The net effect of increasing individual creativity is that the community can converge on novel, high quality solutions more quickly than if all participants simply saw their own ideas [4].…”

“…The net effect of increasing individual creativity is that the community can converge on novel, high quality solutions more quickly than if all participants simply saw their own ideas [4]. Inspirational examples can be drawn from peers' ideas for the same problem [36,44,45], or from external sources [6,18,27]. It is important that example sets be relatively small, because participants have limited time and cognitive resources [20,29].…”