A recipe for creativity

What makes one creative idea take off while another goes nowhere? Conventional wisdom says it’s down to originality.

But that’s only half the story, according to research by Sibel Sözüer, a marketing professor at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School.

What matters most is not always how original an idea is, but how well its different parts work together.

Sözüer used cooking as the laboratory for her research with Professors Oded Netzer and Kriste Krstovski of Columbia Business School. They published their findings in “A Recipe for Creativity: An Ingredient Embedding Approach” in the Journal of Marketing.

Drawing on more than 57,000 recipes from Allrecipes, a popular recipe-sharing website, they investigated whether successful dishes owed more to novel ingredients or to combinations in which different elements worked well together.

They then compared those measures with how often people chose to cook them and how highly they rated the results.

The results showed that novelty is a double-edged sword: People were less likely to cook dishes with unusual ingredients, but those who did rated them more highly.

“People show some hesitancy towards ideas with novel components,” Sözüer says. “They prefer more familiar ingredients at first, even though they evaluate the novel ones more favorably once they’ve tried them. However, fit among idea components is extremely important in either case.”

For creators, that suggests success comes in two stages: winning people over initially might require ideas that feel familiar and different parts that feel well put together. Once people have engaged, however, highlighting its more novel elements can leave a stronger impression.

Meal-kit companies, for instance, could emphasize familiar ingredients in recipes to win new customers, even when a recipe includes more adventurous ingredients.

Platforms such as Google Play, Apple’s App Store and Netflix, she says, could use the approach to predict which new apps or shows are most likely to be tried and well received based on the novelty and coherence of their components.

More broadly, her study shows that creativity is about more than mixing unlikely ingredients. Methods used by other researchers largely judged ideas by how unusual their combinations were. However, Sözüer’s model assessed whether the different ingredients complemented one another, which proved to be a better predictor of which recipes would be a hit.

The researchers also put their findings into practice: They built an AI tool that recommends tweaks to recipes by suggesting ingredients to add, remove or substitute. In tests, its recommendations improved almost every recipe it analyzed.

The top suggestion boosted the number of people who tried out a recipe by an average of 31.7%, while also lifting five-star ratings and curbing one-star reviews.

Sözüer sees AI as a tool for improving human creativity rather than replacing it. Instead of generating ideas from scratch, their system evaluates existing ones and suggests ways to strengthen them.

“AI is a useful tool for speeding up the idea-generation process,” says Sözüer. “It can act as a brainstorming partner. But when it comes to new, cool, groundbreaking ideas, it’s not there yet.”

Her research also suggests that creators need to think about what they are trying to achieve. If the aim is to encourage people to try something new, ideas that build on familiar elements have a clear edge.

Yet if the aim is to leave people impressed afterwards, including more novel elements can pay off, provided these elements still fit together.

“Companies want people to try a product, but they also want them to keep using it,” says Sözüer. “To overcome that initial hesitation towards novelty, we think it might help to highlight familiar features when introducing something new.”

Sözüer’s findings were not confined to the kitchen.

The researchers applied the same approach to more than 1,000 ideas for a new health app and found the same pattern: Ideas with stronger overall fit were viewed as more popular and more likely to be adopted, suggesting the framework could apply well beyond cooking.