Sparking creativity in entrepreneurship courses: Investigating the effect of hybrid brainstorming sessions on business opportunity identification outcomes.

Opportunity Identification (OI) is one of the key entrepreneurial capabilities targeted in most entrepreneurship education programs. The most frequently used technique for facilitating business OI in entrepreneurship courses is brainstorming. Previous findings indicated the positive effect of hybrid (individual and group) settings on overall brainstorming outcomes, i.e., quality and quantity of the generated ideas, compared to only individual or group settings. However, to date, no study has explored the effect of hybrid brainstorming sessions on individual idea-generation skills outside the group, a possibility labelled “group-to-individual transfer”. This study aims to fill this gap by conducting an experimental study with 33 bachelor’s and master’s students who attended an entrepreneurship course at a Dutch university. A repeated measurement study design is used to explore the effect of group idea generation on individual performance outside the group. Based on this design, students passed three phases, i.e., (1) individual, (2) group, and (3) individual idea generation, using an online platform, and the measurement was taken after the individual idea generation phases. The findings indicated that individual idea generation after the group work resulted in fewer comprehensible business ideas but with a higher rate of concrete ideas that were more innovative compared to ideas generated before the group work.