The Effects of Individual Preparations on Group Creativity

Abstract

Although group creativity is considered to be a better way to generate creative ideas than individual creativity, it refers to two situations-individual creativity within the context of a group and group-level creativity. Many researches have discussed how to increase individual creativity within a group, however, the generating mechanism of group-level creativity needs more research. During group creativity process, members' ideas probably cannot be recognized and appreciated. However, if the individual preparations are relatively complete, the results might be different. In this paper, we investigated relatively complete preparations' effects on group creativity with the help of attentions collected by MindWave. Results showed that the relatively complete individual products were actually helpful to increase the originality and profundity of group creativity. The reasons were discussed.