Task and Time Decomposition in Electronic Brainstorming

One aspect of brainstorming that has received little research attention is how the brainstorming task should be presented to the group, whether as one allencompassing question or as a series of separate questions each focusing on one aspect of the task. This paper reports the results of an experiment in which groups electronically brainstormed on intact tasks (where all parts of the task were presented simultaneously) or on decomposed tasks (where three subcategories of the task were presented to the groups). We also examined the effects of decomposing the time periods in which groups worked, either one time period or several shorter ones. Groups in the decomposed task condition generated 40% more ideas, but there were no time effects. We attribute these differences to the ability of task decomposition to refocus members’ attention more evenly across the entire task solution space.