Exploring Idea Quality Evolution During Convergence

Today’s organizations need to develop innovative ideas through teamwork, be it in small teams or large crowds. While organizations can swiftly gather a rich set of ideas, they are increasingly challenged with how to focus on a manageable set of ideas that are likely to serve their goals. Facilitation techniques can support convergence, a team process in which members reduce and clarify ideas, but facilitation effects are thus far largely unexplored. We conducted an exploratory laboratory experiment to address this gap involving 150 participants randomly assigned to 38 teams. We tested the associations between two facilitation components attention guidance and discussion encouragement, on convergence quality, operationalized as task relevance and extent of idea development. Our preliminary results suggest that idea quality increases from generation to convergence across treatments and attention guidance is associated with extent of development. We present plans for additional analyses and further theoretical exploration.