What Do We Really Know about Creativity Techniques? A Review of the Empirical Literature

The ability of continuously generating new products is essential for a company’s long-term success. In fact, every innovation starts with a creative idea. A common approach to generate ideas that are especially creative — i.e. new and useful —is the use of creativity techniques. Despite the existence of more than a hundred of such techniques, only few are popular in business practice, e.g. brainstorming, brainwriting, and TRIZ. Moreover, at first sight, empirical research on creativity techniques is scarce while concentrating on brainstorming in all of its forms. Therefore, this article systematically reviews the existing body of empirical research on creativity techniques in general. Furthermore, we describe and investigate the most noted techniques. Thereby, we provide insights on the development of the scientific literature in that field. Additionally, by highlighting the latest research findings, we give helpful hints for practitioners interested in applying creativity techniques.