Providing Timely Examples Improves the Quantity and Quality of Generated Ideas

Emerging online ideation platforms with thousands of example ideas provide an important resource for creative production. But how can ideators best use these examples to create new innovations? Recent work has suggested that not just the choice of examples, but also the timing of their delivery can impact creative outcomes. Building on existing cognitive theories of creative insight, we hypothesize that people are likely to benefit from examples when they run out of ideas. We explore two example delivery mechanisms that test this hypothesis: 1) a system that proactively provides examples when a user appears to have run out of ideas, and 2) a system that provides examples when a user explicitly requests them. Our online experiment (N=97) compared these two mechanisms against two baselines: providing no examples and automatically showing examples at a regular interval. Participants who requested examples themselves generated ideas that were rated the most novel by external evaluators. ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: CANDC
• Authors: Pao Siangliulue, Joel Chan, Krzysztof Z. Gajos, Steven P. Dow
• Keywords: CANDC 2015, Emerging Technology