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Business News/ Companies / Managers not best judge of creative ideas
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Managers not best judge of creative ideas

Nor is the creator of the idea. So who is best placed to predict if the idea will succeed or not?

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Managers are not always the best judge of creative ideas. Nor is the creator of the idea. So who is best placed to predict if the idea will succeed or not? According to research by Justin Berg, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, it is neither the idea creator nor the manager in charge of evaluating the idea who can predict if the idea will be a hit or not. Instead, the best judges are the peers of the creator who have spent time generating their own ideas, but not the idea in question.

Berg’s research Balancing on the Creative High-Wire: Forecasting the Success of Novel Ideas in Organizations, studies “creative forecasting", or the skill of predicting the success of new ideas, and is to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Administrative Science Quarterly.

Interestingly, Berg’s research is based on a study he conducts on the circus industry. He found that in the circus industry, innovation is divided into two separate roles: creators generate ideas for new acts, and managers evaluate whether to include these acts in future shows. Thus, managers act as gatekeepers between creators and the audience, which is similar to how roles are structured in organizations.

Berg and his team collected over 150 videos of circus acts from creators around the world. Out of these, 10 videos were watched by 339 circus professionals, including both creators and managers, who tried to predict how successful each video would be with the audience. The accuracy of these predictions was then tested using a sample of over 13,000 audience members.

Berg found that creators overestimated how well their videos would do with the audience. In this sense, they were poor forecasters of the effect of their own ideas. However, creators were more accurate judges of their peers’ videos than managers as they were able to recognize value in the more novel or unconventional ideas, whereas managers preferred conventional ideas that did not work too well with the audience.

The study by Berg with the circus industry shows that creators as a group outperform managers in forecasting the success of new ideas, and so companies, particularly those in creative industries, may want to rethink how they define the role of creators and managers. An organization in which creators only create and managers only manage may miss out on the benefits of applying different types of thinking to a task, says Berg. Instead of allowing only managers to evaluate and select ideas, companies should ask creators to weigh in on the idea, maybe by letting them vote on their peers’ ideas.

In the final analysis, managers with creator duties would be best suited when it comes to creative forecasting and staying open-minded to new ideas. “Moving away from specialization is a trend in the business world. More people are wearing more hats. For creative forecasting, that’s probably a good thing," says Berg.

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Published: 09 Mar 2016, 01:47 AM IST
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