Background

Brainstorming was originally proposed by Alex Osborn as a technique to use collaborative groups to spark ideas towards innovation and creativity [1]. This methodology and particularly the brainstorming rules Osborn recommended were first found to be effective, showing that groups using the rules were able to generate more ideas and more “good” ideas than groups who did not use the rules [7]. However, further investigation found that brainstorming groups were less effective at generating ideas than the same number of individuals working separately [6, 8, 9]. These groups of individuals generating ideas separately are called nominal groups. When nominal groups ideas are combined and all duplicate ideas removed, they produce more ideas and more good ideas than collaborative brainstorming groups—we will refer to these as real groups [6, 9].

Most of the above research fixated on the efficiency of brainstorming groups, how many ideas they could produce. Sutton and Hargadon, however, argued that efficiency may not be the only purpose of brainstorming, and they showed that there are several other positive characteristics of brainstorming in practice [4]. By conducting an ethnographic study of the brainstorming sessions of a product design firm for an organization, Sutton and Hargadon found the following positive characteristics of brainstorming groups: Brainstorming groups support the organization’s memory of technical solutions, they provide skill variety, they support an attitude of wisdom in and outside the session, they create a status auction that maintains a focus on designing products, and they impress clients and generate income. All of these positive side effects play a key role in the use of brainstorming groups in context. Oxley, Dzindolet, and Paulus showed that facilitators with the right training can improve the idea generation effectiveness of groups [3]. They used graduate student facilitators with three hours of training. They trained their facilitators to perform a set number of tasks to overcome group hinderances and generate more ideas. Facilitators were trained to perform the following actions: