Industrial design students tend to abandon their most creative new product ideas rather than following through to see where they lead.

That was the result of research conducted by Scarlett Miller, assistant professor of engineering design and industrial engineering at Pennsylvania State University. The newer the idea, the less likely a student would be to pursue the idea, she says.

Willingness to pursue a novel idea correlated to extroversion.Willingness to pursue a novel idea correlated to extroversion.Miller had observed that many of the ideas students proposed to their project teams at the beginning of a semester were not the final product the teams created. She decided to investigate this counterintuitive observation for clues that could be converted to methods of encouraging students to stick to their more innovative ideas.

Her research project assessed student personality traits at the beginning of the semester. The students formed groups of four and tackled their project for semester, designing a device to froth milk for cappuccino. Miller told the teams that their grades would be based on novelty and function.

Prior to digging into the project, each student sketched a few ideas. Students rated their teammates’ ideas and chose one they wanted to build. When teams discussed ideas and opted for a design, Miller recorded their deliberations. The recordings gave her clues about the decision-making process.

Her results indicated that willingness to pursue a novel idea correlated to extroversion, and gender. Males tended to pick their own designs. The most important factor in discarding novel ideas was exactly the quality on which designs were judged: the newness itself.

According to Miller, students expressed concern over the risk in building a design that pushed the boundaries. “Yes, it needs to work,” says Miller. “But it also needs to be a new way of solving the problem.”

Another related finding is that students who come up with the most creative ideas often don’t recognize and pursue them.

The student designer experiment mirrors real-world conditions in business, she says. Corporate culture influences willingness to take risks and then fail. Miller says that those highly innovative companies have plenty of products on the scrap heap as well as products that hit home runs. A company whose culture encourages creativity and does not punish failure is more likely to nurture novelty. The issue is not how to think creatively but how to recognize and use creativity’s fruits.

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