Idea Visibility, Information Diversity, and Idea Integration in Electronic Brainstorming

Comparing Different Sensemaking Approaches for Large-Scale Ideation

“…At this scale, interesting but statistically rare ideas may be less likely to be noticed and built upon, leading the crowd to focus on common ideas. From a cognitive perspective, effective collaborative ideation depends on being able to attend to and deeply process other ideas [35,55]. But people are limited in their capacity to process information [16,47], and the number of ideas produced at crowd scale certainly exceeds this capacity.…”

“…But people are limited in their capacity to process information [16,47], and the number of ideas produced at crowd scale certainly exceeds this capacity. When given too many ideas as potential inspiration, people may stop attending to them, or only build on them in superficial ways [35,55]. Ideally, we would like crowd ideators to focus on the primary task of generating ideas, rather than expending most of their effort making sense of a large volume of ideas in order to extract useful inspiration.…”

“…Ideators may not have sufficient time or cognitive resources to sift through potentially hundreds to thousands of other ideas. Consequently, they may only superficially process and build on ideas rather than leveraging them to generate new insights [35,36]. The presence of superficial details in raw ideas might also lead to cognitive fixation [34,44,56].…”

Semantically Far Inspirations Considered Harmful?

“…In small groups, ideation can be improved by simply exposing all contributors to all ideas [14]; however, at crowd scale, it is not uncommon to have hundreds or thousands of contributions. Ideators do not have sufficient time or cognitive resources to sift through that many ideas to select and build on ideas that are most helpful for their thinking [26,27]. Instead, ideators in these settings often resort to superficial processing of a few ideas [26,27].…”

“…Ideators do not have sufficient time or cognitive resources to sift through that many ideas to select and build on ideas that are most helpful for their thinking [26,27]. Instead, ideators in these settings often resort to superficial processing of a few ideas [26,27]. Consequently, systems that can find and deliver potentially inspiring content to ideators are an important area of technical research and development for large-scale collaborative ideation platforms.…”