Enhancing Collaborative Ideation in Organizations

Extensive research and theory has focused on organizational innovation and the organizational factors that influence that innovation. Research on teams has highlighted a similar set of factors as important for team innovation. However, these literatures have not provided a clear picture of the key factors that influence the collaborative idea exchange processes that occur in teams and organizations. The literature on collaborative ideation has provides a useful theoretical and empirical basis for understanding these processes and the conditions required for optimizing creativity in group interactions. We provide the theoretical and empirical basis for a pragmatic approach to enhancing collaborative innovation processes in various organizational settings and highlight additional research needs and future directions.