Asking for Good Ideas can Hurt Creativity: The Effects of Two-step Instruction Method on Quantity and Quality of Ideas

As the importance of ideas as the basis of innovation is growing bigger, interest in ways to effectively generate creative ideas is increasing as well. This study focused on figuring out the effective methods of instruction used for generating ideas since conventional instructions asking for good ideas can hurt ideation. As an alternative to the conventional instructions, we proposed the Two-step method which gives instruction to generate random ideas that make no sense first and then requires people to revise generated ideas so as to make a lot of creative ideas. We conducted an experiment to find out whether the proposed Two-step method is more effective in generating creative ideas than the method that asks for good ideas or the method that requests random ideas that make no sense. Results show that the Two-step method can help people generate more creative ideas than other methods.