Creative idea forecasting: The effect of task exposure on idea evaluation.

Abstract

History is replete with cases in which people have failed to recognize creative ideas generated by others. In various settings, people are responsible for evaluating ideas generated by others while not being involved in the idea generation process, and thus not exposed to the task. However, little is known on how this lack of task exposure affects creative forecasting. This study therefore examines the effect of task exposure on creative idea evaluation using 1864 German students who evaluated ideas on their creativity, originality and feasibility. Their ratings were compared to ratings by content and creativity experts. The students were randomly assigned to one of the following conditions: task exposure (i.e., they had to generate and evaluate ideas for the same task) or no task exposure (i.e., they had to generate ideas for a different task than the idea evaluation task). The results show that task exposure improves students' ability to accurately recognize creative and original ideas, and their ability to discriminate between highly feasible and unfeasible ideas. As such, these findings suggest that task exposure is beneficial to creative idea forecasting. Together, the results highlight the importance of carefully reconsidering whether people should be exposed to a task before evaluating others' ideas.