The sequential order and quality of ideas in electronic brainstorming

A widely accepted ideation assumption is that the quality of ideas improves as the number of unique ideas increases. In many situations, this assumption also means that better ideas tend to come later in a brainstorming process, which indicates an order effect. We conduct an observational study with 215 electronic brainstorming sessions to explore the following research questions: 1) whether or not the quality of ideas improves as the number of ideas increases and 2) whether better ideas tend to come later in the brainstorming process. This research contributes to the existing literature by providing a rigorous test and strong support that better ideas emerge later in brainstorming sessions and that more ideas lead to better ideas.