Causal Relationships in Creative Problem Solving: Comparing Facilitation Interventions for Ideation

  • Authors:

  • Eric L. Santanen;Robert O. Briggs;Gert-Jan De Vreede

  • Affiliations:

  • Bucknell University;Center for the Management of Information at the University of Arizona and Associate Professor of Collaboration Engineering at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands;Department of Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis at the University of Nebraska at Omaha

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Management Information Systems
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Organizations must be creative continuously to survive and thrive in today's highly competitive, rapidly changing environment. A century of creativity research has produced several descriptive models creativity, and hundreds of prescriptions for interventions that demonstrably improve creativity. This paper presents the cognitive network model (CNM) as a causal model of the cognitive mechanisms that give rise to creative solutions in the human mind. The model may explain why creativity prescriptions work as they do. The model may also provide a basis for deriving new techniques to further enhance creativity. The paper tests the model in an experiment where 61 four-person groups used either free-brainstorming or one of three variations on directed-brainstorming to generate solutions for one of two unstructured tasks. In both tasks, people using directed-brainstorming produced more solutions with high creativity ratings, produced solutions with higher average creativity ratings, and produced higher concentrations of creative solutions than did people using free-brainstorming. Significant differences in creativity were also found among the three variations on directed-brainstorming. The findings were consistent with the CNM.