Brainstorming Literature Review
Is a Group Greater Than the Sum of its Members?: A Literature Review on Brainstorming
This is one of my proudest individual works from my academic career. This literature review was written as a semester project for my class on Advanced Design Methodologies. I was very interested in learning more about collaborative concept generation, so I choose to write my paper on the topic of brainstorming. There was much more to the topic than I could have imagined. This paper summarizes the results of a large number of studies from the past 70 years. The biggest surprise when researching this topic was that there is a vast body of work that indicates that traditional group brainstorming is actually much less effective than having the same number of individuals brainstorm alone. This paper explores these works and the theories and proposed solutions for this productivity gap. It then ends with some insights on the current state of research in the field and how brainstorming is presented to students in academic contexts.