Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea

Summary

The article compares two structures for innovation idea generation: teams working together throughout, and hybrid groups that first work individually and then collaborate. It argues that performance should be judged by the quality of the best ideas selected, not only by idea count or average quality. In an experiment with 44 trained subjects generating 443 product ideas, hybrid groups produced about three times as many ideas, higher average-quality ideas, and higher-quality top generated ideas than teams. Hybrid groups were also better at discerning idea quality, although both structures were weak at selecting their own best ideas. The study finds that team-based interactive buildup occurs more often but does not improve idea quality or quantity, and may reduce variance under some measures.

Important Keywords

Idea generation: producing candidate solutions for an innovation or design problem.
Brainstorming: a group process for generating ideas, often compared with nominal and hybrid structures.
Innovation: developing new product or service ideas with potential value.
Team structure: the way idea generation work is organized among individuals and groups.
Hybrid structure: combining individual idea generation with group interaction to improve idea quality.
Nominal group: people generate ideas independently rather than through interactive group brainstorming.
Idea selection: choosing which generated ideas to advance for evaluation or development.
Best idea quality: the quality of the strongest idea produced by a process, not just the average idea.
Extreme value theory: the statistical logic used to reason about the best idea in a set.
Interactive buildup: group members extending or combining one another's ideas.
Purchase intent: a measure of how likely potential customers say they would be to buy an idea.
Business value: the expected commercial value or attractiveness of an idea.
Ideation: generating possible design ideas.
Hybrid brainstorming: process combining individual generation with group evaluation.
Design fixation: being stuck in familiar assumptions or solution patterns.
Divergence: expanding the set of possible ideas.
Convergence: narrowing toward selected concepts.

Important Concepts

Best-idea performance: The relevant innovation outcome is the quality of the best idea or few best ideas, not the average idea or total idea count.
Four drivers of best-idea quality: Number of ideas generated, average quality, variance in quality, and the group's ability to discern quality jointly determine performance.
Hybrid ideation: A process combining independent idea generation with later group discussion; in the experiment it outperformed pure teamwork on productivity, average quality, top generated ideas, and discernment.
Team process losses: Free riding, evaluation apprehension, production blocking, conformity, and path dependence are proposed mechanisms limiting team brainstorming.
Quality measurement: Ideas were rated through large panels for business value and purchase intent, rather than by one or two assistants.
Interactive buildup: Teams built on prior ideas more often, but buildup did not produce better ideas and did not increase the number of ideas generated.
In user-centered product development, ideas should originate from empirical understanding of users, contexts, issues, tendencies, and requirements.
Generating many alternatives matters because only a small subset of ideas will be strong.
IDEO brainstorming rules are defer judgement, encourage wild ideas, build on others' ideas, stay focused, one conversation at a time, be visual, and go for quantity.
Hybrid brainstorming combines individual idea generation with group discussion/selection and is presented as stronger than traditional group brainstorming.
Ideation should avoid fixation and should later converge through criteria, scenarios, user needs, and concept selection.

Examples

Innovation settings include movie studios reviewing hundreds of plot summaries, companies creating many branding alternatives, and consumer goods firms evaluating alternative product concepts.
Experimental challenges asked participants to generate student-market product concepts for sports and fitness products and for dorm or apartment products.
Sample generated ideas include a mouth guard holder, odor-reducing trash can, water bottle with built-in filter, adjustable racquet, waterproof reading system, chore meter, and noise-reduction pad.