Bounded Ideation Theory

Organizations often look to their information systems (IS) professionals to work with system stakeholders to generate new ideas to solve complex problems and to provide information technology (IT) artifacts to support ideation processes. Much research therefore seeks to increase the number of ideas people generate based on Alex F. Osborn's conjecture that more ideas give rise to more good ideas. Recent research, however, calls the quantity-quality conjecture into question. This paper advances bounded ideation theory (BIT), an explanation for the ideation function—the relationship between the number of good ideas and the number of ideas contributed. BIT posits that boundaries of understanding, attention resources, goal congruence, mental and physical stamina, and the solution space moderate a primary relationship between individual ability and idea quality, yielding an ideation function with an inflected curve. We discuss six strategies for improving ideation and call into question the value of the quantity focus of ideation research in the IS/IT literature, arguing that a quality focus would be more useful.

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