Synergistic Ideation Through Pairing Participants in Facilitated Group Support Systems Sessions

Group Support Systems (GSS) have been used and studied in the support of facili-tated ideation sessions for years. The norm for these sessions has been for participants to work individually at GSS workstations. A review of applicable literature suggests that pairing participants at GSS workstations could result in higher quality ideas and participant satisfaction. This paper reports the results of a lab experiment that tested for differences between paired and unpaired facilitated GSS sessions. These results suggest that pairing participants can yield higher quality ideas from facilitated ide-ation without negative consequences