What makes an effective ideator? The distinct roles of cognition, personality, and experience in early-stage venture ideation

Abstract

A microfoundational account of organizational innovation capability should explain which individual-level attributes distinguish ideators who are better able to generate, select, and elaborate ideas into investment-worthy business concepts. Yet research remains fragmented because prior studies often examine isolated traits and fail to distinguish among key creative ideation outcomes. Drawing on Trait Activation Theory, we conceptualize venture ideation as a staged, trait-relevant context in which cognitive abilities, personality traits, and creative domain experience are differentially expressed across successive stages. We examine this theorizing using a task-based assessment that separates idea quantity , idea originality , and idea quality . Innovation-exposed experts, including R&D experts, managers, and entrepreneurs (n = 208), generated multiple business ideas for a disruptive technology, selected their most promising idea, and refined it into a product or service concept incorporating core elements of a viable business model. Experienced technology-focused venture capitalists evaluated idea quality by indicating whether these concepts merited investment interest. We quantified semantic distinctiveness using multiple large language models as a semantic proxy for selected-idea originality. Divergent thinking predicted idea quantity, but not investor-evaluated idea quality. In contrast, investment-interest judgments were predicted by ideators’ Openness to Experience, creative domain experience, and convergent thinking ability. Overall, our findings show that early-stage venture ideation is not a unitary creative process. Different attributes help ideators generate many ideas and develop selected ideas into investment-worthy business model concepts, advancing a microfoundational account of organizational innovation capability in technology-based venture creation.