In this paper, we explore the relationship between divergent thinking and stakeholder identification on 15 student engineering design teams. We examine the relationship between fluency, originality, flexibility, and elaboration on the Alternate Uses Task (AUT), a common measure of divergent thinking, and in stakeholder identification. We find fluency and originality to be positively and statistically significantly correlated between the AUT and stakeholder identification task. Flexibility was positively correlated and elaboration was negatively correlated; both lacked statistical significance. Our results suggest that divergent thinking and stakeholder identification may be correlated, and leveraging exercises to improve divergent thinking may also help improve stakeholder identification. Future work can continue to explore this relationship with larger sample sizes and additional tasks.
