Can idea generation techniques impede effective ideation?

Purpose: To establish whether the findings of Belski et al. (2015) and Valentine et al. (2017) may be expanded to incorporate a secondary simple ideation techniques such as Size-Time-Cost Operator, or whether the findings may only be limited to the Fields of MATCEMIB technique. Recent research has demonstrated that simple idea generation (ideation) techniques can assist students to generate a significantly higher number of ideas relative to an equivalent control group (Belski et al., 2015), and that students can learn to effectively apply ideation techniques using either a pen-and-paper or computer-based approach (Valentine, Belski, & Hamilton, 2017). This raises the question of how applicable the findings of these studies may be to other ideation techniques in general, and whether certain ideation techniques may actually demonstrate no effective increase in performance, or demonstrate a difference in performance between pen-and-paper or web based approaches. In order to adopt ideation techniques into courses covering creativity or problem-solving, educators should ideally ensure that the techniques in question have been shown to be effective, based upon the outcome of empirical studies.