blog
Enabling innovation: Brainstorming
by Lauren
The business world is buzzing about the word innovation. CEOs rank innovative thinking as one of the most important elements to remaining competitive, but also find it to be the biggest challenge to find it and cultivate it within employees.
One of the biggest problems with innovation today though is not that people do not understand the concept, but that corporate culture often hinders it. The very CEOs who are struggling to encourage people to be innovative are unaware that their companies may not be appropriately designed to breed innovation. For example, if the only way a manager will listen to an employee idea is if they bring them a formalized proposal, the number of potential ideas is already hindered. Creativity does not have to be a group process, but forcing it into a box can compromise actual, actionable innovation. Particularly within our traditional industry, acting upon new Sales and Marketing ideas is often difficult.
Innovative thinking often starts with a brainstorming process. The idea should be to throw things out there and eventually see what sticks, not to force each idea to be sticky in and of itself. Ideo, www.ideo.com, a leading innovation consulting firm suggests creating at least 100 ideas in a 60 minute group brainstorming session. Crazy ideas are encouraged, as they often yield the best usable ideas in the end.
With an appropriately defined end goal, employees should be able to think freely during the brainstorming process; cutting down ideas to the best and most reasonable comes later.
Here at kasina, we have tried and are always trying new ways to foster innovation and brainstorming ourselves. Beyond the brainstorming process itself, just two ideas that we are currently trying include:
A quarterly innovation think tank group: Small teams of 3-4 people work together to identify an issue and develop a solution.
A company ideas board: To foster sharing and collaboration on brainstorming.
What can you do with your team to create more ideas?