The impact of the World Wide Web on idea generation

One apparent benefit Web use provides individuals is the opportunity to seek and find vast amounts of information on virtually any subject. By having more information available, it is reasonable to believe that a user would be able to generate more ideas than he/she would without Web support. Given that the Web is being used more frequently for information and research purposes, an experiment was performed to determine whether Web use can enhance idea generation performance. Preliminary results indicate that while Web use does not harm idea generation performance, it does not help. But, users perceive the Web to be significantly helpful. It is hoped the findings from this project will enhance Web use and development for information and idea gathering.