Promoting cocreativity with real-time automatic novelty feedback in open-ended problem-solving

Abstract Collaborative creativity (cocreativity) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have been integrated into organisations to solve complex challenges. Simultaneously, AI has shown the potential to improve human cocreativity. However, a research gap persists related to the practical integration of AI in the cocreative process to enhance students’ cocreativity in the classroom environment. This paper studies real-time novelty evaluation using AI techniques, how to deliver real-time novelty feedback in a cocreative working space and explores its impact on the cocreation process. A case study-mixed research was designed, involving twenty undergraduate students working in groups to generate a novel solution to an open-ended science challenge using a Google Slide workspace. The co-generated ideas’ novelty was evaluated using the Universal Sentence Encoder technique, and students received real-time feedback on the novelty of their cocreated ideas. Descriptive statistics and qualitative analysis were performed to investigate the impact of receiving feedback on the level of novelty and the presence of cocreative behaviours. Real-time novelty feedback procedure can be successfully implemented during the cocreative process in Google Slides. Besides, the results show that the feedback enhances novelty in the ideas. Furthermore, the feedback received engages and promotes students’ cocreative behaviours, such as stopping when receiving feedback, reading, discussing, and applying it to their ideas. Real-time feedback can be a valuable tool to promote the behaviours that can lead a group to generate novel solutions to tackle key 21st-century challenges. Moreover, it can have a strong pedagogical impact on learning and teaching methodologies for cocreativity.