Structuring Electronic Brainstorming Tasks to Improve Group Creativity: How Structuring Serially Can Benefit Idea Elaboration

Abstract

For several decades, brainstorming in groups and its variants have been widely examined in research as a technique to produce ideas. The way to stimulate elaboration by linking ideas to those previously given by others during a brainstorming session is a challenge for researchers and practitioners aiming to go beyond idea generation. Despite Osborn's (1953, 1963) rules inviting participants to build on ideas of their group members to produce their own, until recently very few studies have explicitly examined idea elaboration and its determinants. The present study aimed to investigate how structuring an electronic brainstorming task using a digital environment to produce ideas freely or serially might influence the elaboration of ideas in groups. A multilevel modeling analysis revealed that, independently of the groups, the quantity and quality of ideas produced, serial brainstorming led to a greater elaboration of ideas than free brainstorming. These findings provide the initial empirical evidence about the efficacy of structuring electronic brainstorming in a serial mode to stimulate idea elaboration in groups.