Beyond Brainstorming

Special Limited Time Offer in Celebration of Creativity and Innovation Day

Today is Leonardo da Vinci’s birthday! Da Vinci was born April 15^th 1452; yes, it has been 556 since one of the most creative individuals in history was born. Happy Birthday Leonardo!!

It’s not a coincidence that today also marks the one week count down to World Creativity and Innovation Day (CID), April 21^st. CID was first celebrated in 2001 after a decade of collaboration between four Canadian faculty members at the Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI) in Buffalo, NY. Their passion for promoting creative thinking has turned into a multinational event that embraces the human creativity and innovative solutions to global challenges.

The goal of CID is to encourage people in schools, communities, businesses, families, organizations, and countries to:

1. Generate new ideas

2. Use imagination

3. Make new decisions

This spirit of this day aligns so well with our mission (bringing people and ideas together) we couldn’t resist doing our part. We brainstormed some ideas of how to give people the tools to generate more ideas, use their imagination, and make new decisions.

I had just finished reading Rohit Bhargava’s new marketing book called Personality Not Included. Rohit tells companies to stop being faceless and leverage techniques and tools to instill personality into every interaction they have with their customers. It’s a great book and, as I do with every book I love, I collect the best ideas to add to my idea library. Well that inspired an idea for the perfect gift to share with our customers! It goes something like this:

SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL OFFER
The first 100 ThinkCube orders placed between April 15^th and 21^st, 2008 will receive a free copy of Personality Not Included and 6 bonus ThinkCube cards with ideas from the book.

ThinkCube Personality Included Special CID Offer

Please note, orders placed during promotional period may require extended handling time. Any order placed with expedited shipping will receive ThinkCube as specified, and then the promotional materials in a separate shipment.

As the CID tagline goes, “Admit it. You’re Creative.” Help us celebrate CID; generate ideas, use your imagination, and make new decisions!

The Farnsworth Invention

Kes and I are HUGE Aaron Sorkin fans. If you aren't familiar with Sorkin, he's a playwright, producer, and screenwriter probably most well known for the NBC series The West Wing. He has a new show on Broadway called The Farnsworth Invention. 

Just as the name implies, it's a story of invention. It's the familiar story of a savvy businessman who gets all the glory for some unknown engineer's idea.

Just a few weeks back I posted An idea is only an idea until... which talks about the same underlying theme. Sometimes the original inventor is robbed of due credit, and other times without the right application, market, marketing, the idea is simply just an idea. It will be interesting to research the history before seeing the play and then see which angle Sorkin takes on the story.

Needless to say, our tickets have been purchased. This age old story at the hands of Sorkin has to be a winner.

An idea is only an idea until…

More often than not, great ideas remain nothing more than great ideas. Even for the best ideas, the road to profitability is long with infinite opportunities for failure. One of the very first hurdles for a great idea is finding the right application.

Academic research is plagued by great ideas with poor applications that never live up to their potential. Check out this recent BusinessWeek article  about a gel that can change color with changes in temperature, moisture, or acidity. It was invented by a team of researchers at MIT and here's what the lead professor offered as a possible application:

“You want your potato chips to be dry and crisp, so if a bit of gel in the package goes blue, you know moisture has crept in.”

Do you need a blue piece of plastic to tell you when you bite into a soggy potato chip? Don’t get me wrong, this is a very cool invention that has real potential. I’m just not sure this particular application is going to make anyone any money.

Think about this in terms of your ideas. Is it possible that a better application exists? Talk to people in your extended social network about how your idea could be useful in their life or business. How would they use it? These new insights could move you that much closer to making your idea profitable.

 

Results of Brainstorming Competition

2 weeks ago I posted a brainstorm challenge on a new online brainstorming website www.brainreactions.com 

I posted the following challenge to generate new ideas for promoting ThinkCube:

Innovation Competition: How can you promote / market a new innovative product: Generate ideas to promote and market a new innovation product, ThinkCube. More information - www.metamemes.com - Ideas are specific and actionable - Ideas require minimal budget End Date: 10/19/2007 Prize: Free ThinkCube ($100 value).

We got 30 new ideas posted in response the challenge. I had a hard time narrowing down the short list to the following (note these are not in order):

1. Become a facilitator for live brainstorms on here - or in a chat room or a facility on your own site - and, if possible, use the ThinkCube as a guide to aid you in prompting participants. Have a different challenge each week. Log all the best ideas on your website. – UKJohn

2. Use ThinkCube to create ideas for bloggers and compile these ideas on a blog post: something like "500 great ideas to improve your blog". Bloggers will link to the article and the article would state that ideas were generated with ThinkCube. You could also do "500 ideas to improve your website" etc. – UKJohn

3. As a tv concept: the Apprentice tv show usually favours people and situations that will produce conflict. Why not create a more positive Apprentice type show that uses ThinkCube to approach challenges and thus acts as a tutorial to viewers? "Apprentice with brains instead of conflict". – UKJohn

4. Give Think Cube's to professor's in the business dept. at a major university. Encourage professor's to speak about the product and potentially utilize the product as part of a class project. – Jmunchies

5. Host an event where either student run businesses or student groups can participate for free. Each group will have to use the Think Cube to solve a major issue their business/group faces frequently. A cash contribution could then be made to the group that solves their issue most effectively through the use of the Think Cube. – Jmunchies

6. Donate ThinkCube to non-profit organizations to help them develop innovative ideas. – glitter

7. Generate teams from local universities or businesses to "play" against or with each other. – glitter

8. Put a video of people playing the game and coming up with great ideas on YouTube.com – anandvc

All of these are great ideas and some of these ideas we had already come up with on our own, but some of these were new and inspiring. Since I initially created the shortlist, I allowed Sue to choose the final winner. She decided that there were 2 ideas she really liked:

1. Donate ThinkCube to non-profit organizations to help them develop innovative ideas. – glitter

2. Become a facilitator for live brainstorms on here - or in a chat room or a facility on your own site - and, if possible, use the ThinkCube as a guide to aid you in prompting participants. Have a different challenge each week. Log all the best ideas on your website. – UKJohn

These ideas were chosen because they are both ideas we can put into practice very easily and we feel would be very effective.

Thank you to everyone that entered. We will be contacting both ‘glitter’ and ‘UKJohn’ about sending them their free ThinkCubes.

I will be putting into action UKJohn’s live brainstorming proposal in the next couple of weeks. I will post a brainstorm challenge this week on selecting a ‘problem’ for the live brainstorm.

Thanks and Happy ThinkCubating,

Playful Innovation, Part 2

Building on my last post, let’s explore some more complex examples of combining existing ideas to form new ideas. Again we will use example cards from the ThinkCube Idea Library. These examples use a mixture of words (red), ideas (blue), and action verbs (green). They are ordered by level of difficulty, with the most challenging type of combination, idea + idea, appearing last.

We tried to think of unique "new" ideas for our examples, but I'll give the caveat that we are not claiming these ideas to be original to us. I also don't claim these to be the best combinations for these particular cards/ideas/words. That's one of the great things about combinatory play. No 2 people will see exactly the same connection between 2 existing ideas. Our life experiences and backgrounds play a large role in how we form new ideas.

You can try an exercise like this on your own using a mix of 6 or so words and ideas. Pick a few words that relate to your industry or a topic you are currently interested in. Then add in a few action verbs like exaggerate, stretch, remove, etc. and then maybe a few random, totally unrelated words. Once you give it a go on your own, try the same exercise with a friend. It's usually worth a few good laughs and you might even come up with a great idea while you're at it!

   

Forget Book Clubs, Start a Brainstorming Club

Seth Godin had a great post a couple of weeks ago about his first year at the Stanford MBA program.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/09/random-acts-of-.html

He talked about a fellow student called Chip Conley that picked 4 other students to join a weekly brainstorming session where they brainstormed ideas for new entrepreneurial ventures. In 1 year they generated over 500 great ideas and learned a lot about business. Seth explains that he probably learned more in those brainstorming session than he did in the rest of his MBA program! Chip went on to run one of the largest independent hotel chains in California and Seth went on to start a number of companies and become a marketing guru.

Over my career I have formed many informal groups of friends where we brainstormed ideas for new businesses, games and other ideas. ThinkCube grew out of my desire to develop a tool that would not only help people come up with ideas, but also to spark a trend in brainstorming clubs. Forget book clubs; I know there are many people like me that would love to join a group to brainstorm ideas. I hear of these groups every now and again but I really want this to be as big as book clubs one day!

I realize most people don’t really know how to organize a brainstorming club and I was hoping having a tool like ThinkCube that provides a process, a library of ideas and creative techniques would allow these people to start their own groups. ThinkCube is a brainstorming club in a box (or cube), just add friends – laughter, ideas and companies will follow.

Do you belong to a brainstorming club? If not, go on, start a brainstorming (ThinkCubation) Club today!! Whether it’s at work or with a group of friends, brainstorming clubs can help generate lots of ideas. Perhaps you could come up with a great idea that could turn into a company or product; or maybe just allow you and your friends to have some brain stimulating fun.

If you already belong to a brainstorming club, write to me and tell me about it. I really believe that ‘Brainstorming Clubs’ could be as big as book clubs one day. Help me spread the word, let’s start an idea revolution!