Is maximising creativity good? The importance of elaboration and internal confidence in producing creative ideas

While knowledge management researchers acknowledge that individuals transition from generation to implementation of ideas, these transitions are not fully understood. The current article focuses on idea elaboration – defined as the transition of an idea from an individual’s mind to one that is expressed in a work context – as a critical step towards creative output – the number of creative ideas an individual generates. Several related hypotheses were explored with a psychologically realistic simulation of creativity. A total of 100,000 trials of the creativity task was simulated to examine the relationship between creativity and creative output. Results suggest that low degrees of creativity combined with the elaboration of conventional ideas may lead to a greater number of creative ideas. The current article contributes to the field of knowledge management by leveraging the dynamics of cognition and stressing the importance of idea elaboration and the role that internal confidence plays.