Abstract Collaborative brainstorming is often followed by a convergence activity where teams extract the most promising ideas on a useful level of detail from the brainstorming results. Contrary to the wealth of research on electronic brainstorming, there is a dearth of research on convergence. We used experimental methods for an in-depth exploration of two facilitation-based interventions in a convergence activity: attention guidance (focusing participants on procedures to execute a convergence task) and discussion encouragement (engaging participants in conversations to combine knowledge on ideas). Our findings show that both attention guidance and discussion encouragement are correlated with higher convergence quality. We argue that attention guidance’s contribution is in its support of coordination, information processing, and goal specification. Similar, we argue that discussion encouragement’s contribution is in its stimulation of idea clarification and idea combination. Contrary to past research, our findings further show that satisfaction was higher after convergence than after brainstorming.

中文翻译：

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超越头脑风暴：探索团队的融合

摘要 协作头脑风暴之后通常会进行融合活动，团队从头脑风暴结果中提取有用的细节水平上最有前途的想法。与大量的电子头脑风暴研究相反，缺乏对融合的研究。我们使用实验方法深入探索了融合活动中两种基于促进的干预措施：注意力引导（让参与者专注于执行融合任务的程序）和讨论鼓励（让参与者参与对话以结合思想知识）。我们的研究结果表明，注意力引导和讨论鼓励都与更高的收敛质量相关。我们认为注意力引导的贡献在于它支持协调、信息处理、和目标说明。类似地，我们认为讨论鼓励的贡献在于它对想法澄清和想法组合的刺激。与过去的研究相反，我们的研究结果进一步表明，收敛后的满意度高于头脑风暴后的满意度。