362. Karpukhina & Wang. A Silly Strategy.
Tatiana Karpukhina & Jiabi Wang
May 8, 2025
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In this interview Tatiana Karpukhina, assistant professor at WU Vienna Austria, and Jiabi Wang, a PhD student at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, discuss their research into how intentionally silly ideas can unlock creative potential. This counterintuitive approach challenges traditional notions of brainstorming and offers a fresh perspective on innovation. The conversation focuses on how starting with seemingly unusable ideas can lead to more genuinely creative outcomes.
Key takeaways include:
The "Be Silly" Strategy: By starting with intentionally silly or "stupid" ideas—those that are novel but obviously wrong or unusable—individuals can break free from cognitive fixation on familiar and "useful" ideas.
Leaning into Novelty: Creative ideas need novelty to lead the way. Focusing on silly ideas first helps to expand the cognitive space and creates fertile ground for finding solutions that are both novel and useful.
AI Assistance: Surprisingly, using AI like ChatGPT to outsource silly idea generation can be equally effective, showing the power of simply being exposed to novel, unusable ideas.
Practical Application: The Be Silly strategy can be applied to various tasks, from generating new product ideas to crafting dating profiles, and even to getting clients on board with creative pitches.
Overcoming Barriers: Being silly helps overcome both cognitive and emotional barriers to creativity, such as fear of judgment or stress. It makes the process more playful and less intimidating.
Unexpected Efficiency: Starting with silly ideas can kickstart the creative process, broaden perspective, and often leads to quicker, more innovative solutions than trying to generate ‘useful’ ideas from the start.
Tatiana Karpukhina is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Marketing and Consumer Research at the Department of Marketing at WU Vienna, Austria.
She is a marketing generalist with a background both in academia and in the industry. She gained practical experience working in various consumer intelligence roles at GfK (now merged with Nielsen), and as a data scientist at Booking.com. Tatiana’s primary academic research interests lie in the fields of consumer innovation and creativity.
In her work Tatiana aims to bring industry perspective into academia and implement academic insights in practice. She is an award-winning teacher, an advisor for TU Vienna’s Innovation Incubation Centre and an armature improv actress.
Jiabi Wang is a PhD student in the Behavioral Science department at Chicago Booth, researching motivation and time perception. Her work focuses on helping people stay motivated in pursuing their goals and making better decisions over time. Before joining the PhD program, Jiabi earned a master’s degree in Management Studies from Yale and studied in Hong Kong, France, Australia, and China.
Contributing Author, Not Interviewed
Martin Schreier is Professor of Marketing and Head of the Department of Marketing and the Institute for Marketing Management at WU Vienna. Before joining WU in 2012, he has been on the faculty at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. Between 2021 and 2024, he has been serving as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Research in Marketing, the official journal of the European Marketing Academy (EMAC). Since 2024 he is an EMAC Fellow.
His research has been published in academic journals such as the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Research, and Management Science. His work has also been featured in international media outlets such as the Harvard Business Review as well as in prominent German-speaking media including, TV (e.g., 3SAT), radio stations (e.g., Ö1), and newspapers (e.g., Handelsblatt). Moreover, his research has been honored with several awards, including among others, the INFORMS TIMES Best Paper Award 2019 for the Management Science paper “Integrating problem solvers from analogous markets in new product ideation” (together with N. Franke and M. Poetz).
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Tatiana Karpukhina
Jiabi Wang
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