Olivier Toubia, a Ph.D. candidate at the Marketing Group (MIT) has an article (PDF) on Idea Generation, Creativity, and Incentives.

Idea generation is critical … However, there has been relatively little formal research on the underlying incentives with which to encourage participants to focus their energies on relevant and novel ideas.

This paper examines whether carefully tailored idea generation incentives can improve creative output.

Toubia used three types of incentives to trigger idea generation:

• A Flat condition where participants got $10 for showing up,
• An Own condition where participants got $3 for every idea they submitted, and
• An Impact condition where each participant got $2 for each time an idea they submitted built on one of their previous ideas.

See the sift everything experiment for a graph of the results.

Why I blog this? Because, as Jeremy says, “There is a lesson here for entrepreneurs regarding individual effort. If you can’t spend this kind of time [>20 hours], how can you hope to come up with deep, novel, thought-provoking ideas?”

iUpload Perspectives Applied (what’s this):

 Technorati Tags: Creativity, Ideas, Idea Generation, Incentives, Management Science