The effectiveness of group brainstorming in engineering problem solving

A number of claims have been made for the effectiveness of group brainstorming as a means of enhancing creativity in problem solving groups, and the technique has been quite widely used for this purpose. There is, however, little solid evidence for the superiority of group to pooled individual brainstorming. This paper reviews the available evidence, and reports three new experiments evaluating group brainstorming for engineering problems, using executives as well as student subjects, group sizes of 2, 4, and 6, time periods of 50 and 90 minutes, and mixtures of group and individual work. The findings extend and support the previous evidence of the ineffectiveness of group brainstorming for engineering problems. The pooling of individual brainstorming efforts appears to be the preferred procedure.