Brainstorming online

Brainstorming; a method that has been discussed for ages. Alex Osborne is credited with “inventing” the creativity technique around 1930’s.

“It is easier to tone down a wild idea than to think up a new one.“- Alex Osborne claimed.

Brainstorming is method of thinking up solutions, ideas or new concepts. The idea is to go for quantity in idea generation and leave the criticism out of the discussion. Idea evaluation is a later stage. However, here I’m not interested in discussing the method further but to rather discuss the helpful tools that exists, and don’t exist for this exercise.

In student projects, research projects, live industrial projects I’ve had the ability to see, and coach, teams with purpose of generating ideas in order to solve problems, come up with new products, services or solutions. It is quite easy to see that brainstorming (and closely related creativity techniques) works pretty well in geographically close teams , i.e. you can put the team in the same room for the session.

The problem is that a lot of todays businesses are global, and teams need to be global, hence physical meeting requirements should be reduced to a minimum (I do know that social aspects play a role so of course it’s good to meet once and a while). The past couple of years we have made efforts in setting up global teams that have a purpose of doing product innovation. We’ve done this primarily together with Stanford University, and their Center for Design Research division. The purpose being in research to see the needs of the teams and how to support them with tools and methods. The teams competition is often parallel teams, locally situated. The fun part is that this globally dispersed teams often outperforms the local teams, reasons can be pure motivation since the challenges are many; cultural differences, social differences, time zone difference etc.

So, so, back to brainstorming support.

I’ve tried several tools (and methods), and some of them stick while others fade away. There are ambitious tools and there are really lightweight solutions out there. Still, I see the need for a tool that support the way of work we see happening in industry today and that will be predominant in the future. This tool should be at the hands of the product development teams.

The tool should support:

• Synchronous and asynchronous work mode
• Build on other ideas
• Facilitation
• Reporting
• Idea management
• Image upload
• Hyper linking
• Personalization of work area
• etc…

The idea for tool will now move into the Garage for work.

Definition of Product

It is interesting to notice that there exist an ISO definition of “product”:

“A product is an output that results from a process. Products can be tangible or intangible, a thing or an idea, hardware or software, information or knowledge, a process or procedure, a service or function, or a concept or creation. Please note that when ISO uses the term product they also mean service.“

Hmm, I also think that “product” is what the customer pay for, and if that product is intangible, people call it service. But if it is a software (intangible) it is not called service, rather software; Jilx!! Well, well, lets skip that and se what will come out of the processes first, THEN we can argue on what to name it…