RESEARCH REPORT - THE EFFECTIVENESS OF MULTIPLE DIALOGUES IN ELECTRONIC BRAINSTORMING

Members of brainstorming groups often pursue the same set of ideas rat her than considering a wide and diverse range of ideas, which may redu ce the number of ideas they produce. One way to reduce this cognitive inertia may be to encourage groups to engage in several simultaneous d iscussions or dialogues. This experiment, which studied groups brainst orming electronically, found that groups generated more ideas, more hi gh-quality ideas, and more novel ideas when using multiple dialogues t han when using single dialogues.