How can we encourage creativity?

Throughout this course, we've had a lot of opportunities to exercise our skills in creativity and innovation, but one final piece of the puzzle is missing – how do we know if we're being creative in the right way, or if we're being creative enough? How can we be more creative? We decided to turn to science (specifically, a scientific article) for answers.

The article we chose to review is Constraining Ideas: How Seeing Ideas of Others Harms Creativity in Open Innovation by Hofstetter et al. (2020). Link to article: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0022243720964429

This article challenges the perspective that exposure to others’ ideas breeds innovation, using as an example the phenomenon of companies turning to open innovation contests – contests where anyone can participate and all ideas are open to be viewed the public – to find new and innovative ideas for their own activities.

What sets these contests apart from other well-known idea generation processes like brainstorming is that they are competitions: “Indeed, being confronted with numerous prior ideas as competitors, rather than pure sources of information or inspiration, will heighten the perceived challenge of separating one’s ideas from the pack, even when many more solutions are still possible.” This study is relevant to any organization looking to source innovation, since it can provide some insight into what kind of conditions harm innovation rather than inspiring it.

How to create the right conditions for innovation?
Did you know that even non-competitive idea generation activities can have harmful effects? You might want to look out for the following in your next brainstorming session:

• whether everyone is getting enough time to talk – someone might have a good idea, but start doubting themselves while they wait to actually introduce it, or even forget the idea by the time they get to speak;
• how much pressure is put on those who have “bad” ideas – similar to the above point, someone might not want to share their idea out of fear that it might be criticized or rejected. One way to get around this would be to encourage “bad” ideas to be built upon, rather than outright dismissed;
• whether those who contribute less to the group are free-riding – if someone feels like they have nothing to contribute in terms of good ideas, they might start feeling like a disposable member of the group and rely on others to do the work instead, which can both lead to that person being even less creative and increased frustration from members of the group who are contributing, since they are now doing more work than they signed up for.

A way to avoid these problems is to host the brainstorming session electronically, in an environment where anyone can share their ideas as soon as they come to mind and they have more exposure to other ideas that can be developed further. But if that’s the case, then…

Doesn’t this article say exposure to other ideas is bad? How are innovation contests harmful?
Turning innovation into a contest, with a system of ranks and (often financial) rewards, increases the pressure to come up with an amazing idea that stands out from the rest. The more competition there is, the lower the general motivation to put effort into coming up with the winning idea becomes, as the odds of winning start to look more and more impossible. Understandably, this sort of environment can make innovation a stressful, rather than fun, endeavour. Rules in many competitions that ideas must be 100% original only adds to this pressure – two teams might have similar ideas that are executed completely differently, but the fact that anyone (including them) can see that they had the same idea makes it look like one is copying the other. This leads to the main ideas the article is looking to prove:

1. the more ideas contest participants are exposed to, the lower their creativity becomes;
2. exposure to a large amount of ideas in a non-competitive situation increases creativity;
3. a higher level of expertise in one’s field increases the negative impact of exposure to other ideas in a competition setting.

Study results and what can be learned from them
Through a series of experiments, this study managed to prove that yes, exposure to other ideas in a competition (even if only a small amount of ideas is shown!) has a negative impact on the creativity of participants, even though this exposure inspires creativity in a non-competitive environment. This is important to note for anyone hosting an innovation competition who is concerned about finding a really good and unique idea – if the competing ideas are open for viewing, you might end up with a lot of them, but they probably won’t be as innovative as they could have been.

This fact is also relevant to anyone looking to innovate in their company, in the classroom or in any group setting in general – the solution here is to let everyone first write down individually all the ideas they have before they begin to share them with others. This maximizes the chances that you’ll receive a wide range of unique ideas, and you can use the creative resources of the entire group to make sure these unique ideas reach their full potential.

Teaching creativity and innovation
Here’s a quick and easy way we came up with to test this theory for ourselves: this activity can be done in pairs or in larger groups, but you should split yourselves into two groups with at least one person on each side. Your task is to come up with a business idea for a food start-up (or any other industry you want, but let’s stick with food for the example). You have five minutes to write down ideas.

• one member of your pair (or one half of your group) has to come up with ideas in complete isolation from others.
• the other member (or other half) should look at this list of food start-up ideas before beginning their five minutes of idea generation. None of the ideas you come up with should be the same as those on the list.
• assign one person to evaluate which half came up with the best ideas, or you can discuss amongst yourselves to reach a conclusion – either way, you should agree that whoever wins will receive a prize.

Afterwards, discuss how you felt each set of conditions contributed to or hindered your creative abilities – was it difficult or easier to generate ideas without seeing what other people had already come up with? What about when you saw other ideas first?

This is also a good exercise to figure out how you can be more creative in your everyday life, by understanding which set of conditions you need to produce your most innovative ideas – and you can create these conditions for yourself whenever you need to be creative going forward.