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Hutch, Good points and thanks for pointing out the studies. I've thought of idea management, collaborative networks and open innovation as methodologies to introduce chaos into very structured environments to spur change. But lately I've been thinking it can do the opposite equally well. Perhaps it can apply structure to already chaotic systems? The example I can think of is the loan process. You have bankers in different departments (customer service, underwriters, different banks, different pools of borrowers with different loan requirements). Lots of people and facts and sources of facts (I'm thinking of how much paper there was for my mortgage). Couldn't a collaborative system help apply structure to this chaos by providing a system where the lenders can fish the pool for the best deals, borrowers can shop rates, all the paperwork can be accumulated along the process, input from different departments can be amassed. So sort of the opposite of Amy Shuen and Clayton Christensen's introduction of chaos to structure....structure to chaos.
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Neat way you've framed that. Introducing "chaos" into structure. I also like your loan example. I once worked at Bank of America, so I can appreciate the subtleties of that process. Your example somewhat reminds me of another post written here, Goal Setting Stimulates Employee Innovation. How could a distributed workforce improve the loan process at each major step along the way?
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I work as a trainer and educator in both for-profit and not-for-profit environments, and while I can ascertain that the findings of Girotra, Terwiesch and Ulrich tend to hold beyond many other contexts than the academic one they looked at, I have more doubts about some of your conclusions.
Most importantly, the study did not look at distributed idea generation - the subjects were in the same room and were introduced to the challenges together; and within this setting one group started with a collective brainstorming session rightaway, while another allowed for individual reflections first.
The study did not look at idea generation by groups of people not in the same room, and this makes a tremendous difference. Your physical presence in a particular place for a particular purpose at a particular time heavily influences how much energy and creativity you feel like and can invest in thinking about any kind of challenge.
Against my experience from practice I would argue that the results of idea generation processes—when facilitated well—are always better when people are face-to-face, as compared to long-distance distributed processes.
What the authors of the study call a hybrid approach has been around for a long time and is usually referred to as nominal group technique - time is given for people to write down their ideas anonymously. Such techniques were developed against the context of needing to bypass hierarchies, allowing people to judge the idea of a quality by the idea itself and not by the rank of the person who suggested it.
I don't know any colleague in the field who runs a brainstorming session without giving people time to think on their own; and there are many, many more clever methodological twists in which brainstorming sessions can be made more powerful and rewarding.
The idea of applying extreme value theory to brainstorming is a good one, and the illustration is great - but the two examples chosen for the research (referred to as team approach and hybrid approach) are light-years behind actual educational practice in the field. Unfortunately.
But be that as it may - I just don't see how there is any way in which you can deduce from this particular study that distributed ways of generating ideas are more powerful.
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