ICIS '99 Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Information Systems
Culture and anonymity in GSS meetings
Information management
Journal of Management Information Systems
Impact of GDSS: opening the black box
Decision Support Systems
Post-adoption behavior of users of Internet Service Providers
Information and Management
Improving the Effectiveness of Virtual Teams by Adapting Team Processes
Computer Supported Cooperative Work
ThinkLets: a collaboration engineering pattern language
International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology
Behaviour & Information Technology
On the Measurement of Ideation Quality
Journal of Management Information Systems
Using improvisation to enhance the effectiveness of brainstorming
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
GroupMind: supporting idea generation through a collaborative mind-mapping tool
Proceedings of the ACM 2009 international conference on Supporting group work
ICWL '009 Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Advances in Web Based Learning
Momentum: getting and staying on topic during a brainstorm
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Individual creativity in teams: The importance of communication media mix
Decision Support Systems
Next step in electronic brainstorming: collaborative creativity with the web
CHI '11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Idea visibility, information diversity, and idea integration in electronic brainstorming
FAC'11 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Foundations of augmented cognition: directing the future of adaptive systems
Journal of Management Information Systems
Journal of Management Information Systems
Firestorm: a brainstorming application for collaborative group work at tabletops
Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces
Brainstorming under constraints: why software developers brainstorm in groups
BCS-HCI '11 Proceedings of the 25th BCS Conference on Human-Computer Interaction
International Journal of Mobile Communications
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Electronic brainstorming (EBS) has been proposed as a superior approach to both nominal brainstorming (working alone) and face-to-face brainstorming (verbal). However, existing empirical evidence regarding EBS's superiority over nominal brainstorming is weak. Through a comprehensive examination of the process gains and process losses inherent to different brainstorming approaches, this paper explains past results. The paper also suggests that the process gain versus process loss advantages of EBS technologies may not be large enough to enable EBS groups to outperform nominal groups. In an effort to find alternate ways of using EBS more productively, three conditions thought to increase EBS's process gains and decrease its process losses (thus improving its productivity) are identified. A laboratory experiment designed to compare the productivity of ad hoc and established groups using four brainstorming technologies (nominal, EBS-anonymous, EBS-nonanonymous, verbal), generating ideas on socially sensitive and less sensitive topics, in the presence and absence of contextual cues, is then described. The results of the experiment showed that overall, groups using nominal brainstorming significantly outperformed groups using the other three brainstorming approaches. Further, even under conditions thought to be favorable to EBS, nominal brainstorming groups were at least as productive as EBS groups. The paper explains these results by suggesting that the process gains of EBS may not be as large as expected and that the presence of four additional process losses inherent to EBS technologies impair its productivity. It is also argued that the prevailing popularity of group brainstorming (verbal or electronic) in organizations may be explained by the perceived productivity of those approaches. These perceptions, which are at odds with reality, create the illusion of productivity. A similar misperception may also cause an illusion of EBS productivity in the research community, especially when perceptual measures of group performance are used.