Combined Intuition and Rationality Increases Software Feature Novelty for Female Software Designers

TL;DR

This study shows that female software designers who combine intuition and rationality produce more novel software features, highlighting the importance of diverse cognitive styles in fostering innovation.

Contribution

It demonstrates that combining intuition and rationality in female designers enhances software feature novelty, a novel insight into cognitive diversity's role in software innovation.

Findings

Female practitioners with both cognitive styles produced the most novel features.

Combining intuition and rationality correlates with increased software innovation.

Cognitive style diversity benefits software design creativity.

Abstract

Overcoming society's complex problems requires novel solutions. Applying different cognitive styles can promote novelty when designing software aimed at these problems. Through an experiment with 80 software design practitioners, we found that female practitioners who had a preference for more than one cognitive style (intuition and rationality) produced the most novel software features of all participants.