Idea assessment in a business setting

Abstract

During the past decades, researchers have increasingly been interested in creativity as a field of study. Many models and theories emphasize the evaluation of creative ideas, but this subset of creativity research is still understudied and not yet fully understood. Common for creativity and evaluation research is the fact that both explore individual, group, leadership and more aggregated levels of the two processes. By testing individual factors against evaluative accuracy of popular and original ideas among business people, we found that the attitude preference for ideation was negatively correlated to popular evaluative skills, while preference for premature closure was negatively correlated to both evaluations of popular and original ideas. Ideational fluency was significantly related to evaluative accuracy, but only with evaluative accuracy of popular ideas. Working experience was close to uncorrelated with evaluative accuracy, whereas a negative relationship was found between leadership experience and evaluative accuracy of popular ideas. Our final finding was that educational length positively and significantly correlated with evaluative accuracy of popular ideas.