Creating Great Ideas: Combining Open Innovators and Extroverted Peers on a Team

Sharique Hasan and Rembrand Koning have conducted research on idea generation in teams, using a unique field experiment design.  These scholars conducted their field experiment within the opening week of an entrepreneurship academy in India during the summer of 2014.  The scholars begin by noting that prior research suggests that, "Individuals with higher openness are more creative because they seek out diverse information and experiences, but also recombine these more effectively into novel ideas."  However, they explore how creativity may be enhanced when we combine these open innovators with extroverted peers.  Why does the combination of individuals enhance creativity within a team?  They argue that extroverted peers provide new, unique, interesting, and diverse information to the open innovators,   In short, those conversations with extroverted peers provide fuel for the open innovators.  Here's a summary of their conclusions:

Contrary to prior research, we find that being open to experience alone does not lead individuals to generate better ideas (e.g. McCrae, 1987; Feist, 1998). Our findings suggest that this individual capability depends on the types of peers with whom a focal innovator converses. When open innovators are exposed to extroverted peers, they are more likely to develop higher quality ideas–ones that are evaluated higher, are more detailed, and have more distinct word usage compared to other ideas. Conversely, more open innovators whose peers are not extroverted appear to produce mostly average ideas. In terms of magnitude, while this effect alone will not make the lowest-quality ideas the best ones, it can shift ideas at the margins of “good” to “very good” or “very good” to “great.” This is equivalent of moving an idea from being at the 80th percentile of quality to being in the top decile. Overall, our findings highlight the importance for considering the specific nature of social inputs in to the production of good ideas. Moreover, this insight—about the value of a dyadic interaction for information acquisition and ideation—can fruitfully be used to design teams that have a preponderance of those individuals who can help develop high-quality ideas within teams.