Increase your Success – become an Ideas Carrier

You can increase your success in business if you can become an ideas carrier, someone who identifies, collects and communicates fresh ideas for other people’s business challenges. If you work in an office you can do this for your colleagues, your boss or the people who report to you. If you are a consultant or [...]

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Intensive Bottled Creativity

The next meeting of the BQF Innovation Unit will be an Ideas Jam on the morning of July 13th in central London.  It will be fun, challenging, interactive, intensive and creative.  You will learn new ideation methods, meet interesting people and work with them to develop radical ideas.  It is open to members and non-members.  [...]

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Where are you most innovative – on your own or in a crowd?

There is an interesting blog on Zenhabits which looks at the habits of highly creative people. It finds that most of them rate solitude as the best way to find creative ideas. However others prefer the stimuation of participation in a group. When do you get your best ideas – when on your own or [...]

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Run Creative Ideas Events

If there is an important issue that needs some creative ideas then set a specific challenge for it and run an ideas event. A regular brainstorm or ideation meeting is fine but why not add some excitement with a different approach?

Here are the sorts of events you could run:

• A lunchtime brainstorm with [...]

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Is Brainstorming a Waste of Time?

Mark McGuiness on his blog, Lateral Action, asks the question, ‘Is brainstorming a waste of time?’  He produces a number of serious critics who hate brainstorms and claim that there is little evidence that they work.   The main criticisms are:

Not enough good ideas Lack of critical filters Inhibition Freeloading Taking turns Group think

He then [...]

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Brainstorming – which approach works best?

There is an interesting post on some research on Brainstorming here on the Innovation Tools site.  Josh Hyatt of the Sloan Management Review discusses some research by Karan Girotra, a professor at INSEAD, and Christian Terwiesh and Karl T. Ulrich, both professors at the University of Pennsylvania.

Two types of groups generated ideas. One followed [...]

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SCAMPER – a powerful product innovation tool

One of the methods I teach on my Ideas Workshops is SCAMPER.  It is a productive and versatile technique for examining a product or service from differing angles and for generating plenty of strongly innovative ideas.  SCAMPER is an acronym and you ask the following types of question when you use this tool:

SUBSTITUTE – [...]

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Customers can guide innovation

Customers can be an important source of innovative ideas.  Many companies conduct conventional customer surveys and focus groups.  These are useful channels of feedback but in terms of original ideas they are often disappointing.  Customers are good at demanding incremental improvements in products, lower prices and better service but they are notoriously poor at predicting [...]

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