Brainstorming

How do you stimulate employees to come up with creative ideas to make your enterprise a better place to work, more profitable, stronger, etc.? One approach is brainstorming. Like the term "focus group" the term "brainstorming" has been so bastardized that it is often used to refer to coming up with wild ideas, such as "Hey, I just had a brainstorm." Those suffering from epilepsy may take issue with the term, but most of us don't take issue with it. But, despite it's having been homogenized in the culture, it is a specific technique.

According to Wikipedia, the free, on-line encyclopedia,

Brainstorming is a group creativity technique designed to generate a large number of ideas for the solution to a problem. The method was first popularized in the late 1930s by Alex Faickney Osborn in a book called Applied Imagination. Osborn proposed that groups could double their creative output by using the method of brainstorming.

Although brainstorming has become a popular group technique, researchers have generally failed to find evidence of its effectiveness for enhancing either quantity or quality of ideas generated. Because of such problems as distraction, social loafing, evaluation apprehension, and production blocking, brainstorming groups are little more effective than other types of groups, and they are actually less effective than individuals working independently. In the Encyclopedia of Creativity, Tudor Rickards provides the article on brainstorming, summarizing the controversies. He also indicates the dangers of conflating productivity in group work with quantity of ideas.

There have been numerous attempts to improve brainstorming or replace it with more effective variations of the basic technique. Although traditional brainstorming may not increase the productivity of groups, it may still provide benefits, such as enhancing the enjoyment of group work and improving morale. It may also serve as a useful exercise for team building.

Dictionary.com gives this definition of it:

a conference technique of solving specific problems, amassing information, stimulating creative thinking, developing new ideas, etc., by unrestrained and spontaneous participation in discussion.

Entrepreneurs need to know about the approach, whatever the literature may say about it. Go to the Wikipedia article and follow the links.

There are rules for conducting it and countless variations on it. Try it out and see if it works for you. If it seems to be productive, that is it produces some valuable ideas, then it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't and abandon it.

What do you think about this? Have you ever gone to a store which is in disarray? Hard to find stuff which increases the search cost. Post a comment.

Entrepreneurship 2.0 is my entrepreneurship course. The ideas in it supply the life's blood of my professional activities: teaching, writing, and real estate. For entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for entrepreneurial writing to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot/com.