It’s pretty rare to find an organization these days that doesn’t strive to be more innovative.  Equally, it’s commonplace for organizations to strive to tap into the wisdom of their entire workforce, and to encourage ideas to flourish from whichever source.  It stands to reason however that if ideas are to be encouraged, any method for ensuring those ideas are best cultivated should be taken seriously.

New research from the University of Texas at Austin suggests that a good way to unlock our creative potential is to encourage an abundance of ideas to flood forth, before then stepping back and providing an ‘incubation period’ to allow the ideas to develop and be assessed by our brains.

Encouragement should be provided for ideas to emerge of whatever quality, as the authors believe that this creation process is ultimately one that is improved with practice, and in their experiments both the quality and quantity of ideas improved the more participants attempted to come up with fresh ideas.

Creative performance

The researchers were well aware that an incubation period is widely regarded as being beneficial to the creative process, but they wanted to explore what happens if you add incentives to the mix.

The authors conducted a couple of experiments that required participants to complete a creative task.  Some of the volunteers were given a financial reward based upon the number of ideas they came up with, some were given the reward based upon the number of high quality ideas, whilst another group were given a fixed ‘salary’ regardless of either the quantity or quality of their ideas.

The results are interesting, as to begin with none of the incentivized groups were able to outperform the ‘salaried’ group.  When they returned to the creative task after a few days break however, those who had been incentivized to be creative significantly outperformed the control group, both in the quantity of ideas produced and their quality.

Incubating ideas

The authors believe that this incubation period was crucial to the success of the experiment, and suggest that a process of mass ideation followed by a rest period can significantly improve people’s creativity.

Obviously in this experiment, the rest period was around a week, but in a second experiment the researchers showed that the rest period can in fact be much shorter.  Indeed, just a quiet, 20 minute walk around campus was enough to trigger the same kind of boost to the quality and quantity of ideas.

“You need to rest, take a break and detach yourself — even if that detachment is just 20 minutes,” the authors conclude. “The recipe for creativity is try — and get frustrated because it’s not going to happen. Relax, sit back, and then it happens.”