Thinking ‘inside the box’ holds a Source of Creativity, says Study

new research has revealed that in order to solve something, it is important to work from within the nucleus of a problem.

From a very long time, it has been thought that thinking out of the box initiates a creative process.

However, the new study claims that thinking inside the box holds a source of creativity, too.

University of Pittsburgh graduate student Joel Chan and his mentor Christian Schunn of Pitt's Learning Research and Development Center have collected surprising evidence.

They crowd-sourced their data using OpenIDEO, which is a web-based innovation platform for problem solving in domains ranging from environmental conservation to human rights violations and job growth for youth.

The process took up to 10 weeks and occupied more than 350 participants and thousands of ideas. The participants gave more concrete, increasingly detailed solutions to the specific problem at hand.
Dr. Chan said, "Creativity studies typically have many participants solve 'toy' problems or observe few participants solving real problems. In our study we had both, lending greater strength to our conclusions".

Then, OpenIDEO experts created a shortlist of what they saw to be viable creative solutions to the problem. The team collected its data at the conclusion of the OpenIDEO process. They then entered it into an algorithm to determine whether an idea was sourced near (inside the box) or far (outside the box).

This algorithm was first examined against human judgments and proved to be quite good at determining idea distance. It was found that the vast majority of ideas that were shortlisted are not the fruits of out-of-the-box thinking but reflected a more centered approach.

They results suggested that building upon an existing idea more closely related to the problem was beneficial. The findings were published in Design Studies.

Source
http://wtexas.com/content/1411868-thinking-inside-box-holds-source-creativity-says-study