The selection of creative ideas after individual idea generation: Choosing between creativity and impact

Abstract

It is commonly assumed that successful innovation depends on creative idea generation: the more ideas are generated, the higher the probability of selecting a very good idea should be. However, research has shown that people do not perform optimally at idea selection and that ideational output may not contribute much to creative idea selection. The present studies aim to explain this phenomenon. We identified the strong tendency of our participants to select feasible and desirable ideas, at the cost of originality, as the main reason for their poor selection performance. Two manipulations of participants' processing of the available ideas (exclusion instructions and quality ratings) had no effect on selection effectiveness. In contrast, explicitly instructing participants to select creative or original ideas did improve selection effectiveness with regard to idea originality, but at the same time decreased participants' satisfaction and the rated effectiveness of chosen ideas. Results are discussed in relation to an effectiveness-originality trade off.