Brainstorming Doesn’t Really Work : The New Yorker

ANNALS OF IDEAS about brainstorming and creativity. In the late nineteen-forties, Alex Osborn, a partner of the advertising agency B.B.D.O., decided to write a book in which he shared all of his creative secrets. “Your Creative Power” was filled with a variety of tricks and strategies, but Osborn’s most celebrated idea was the one discussed in Chapter 33, “How to Organize a Squad to Create Ideas.” When a group works together, he wrote, the members should engage in a “brainstorm.” The book outlined the essential rules of a successful brainstorming session. The single most important of these, Osborn said, was the absence of criticism and negative feedback. Brainstorming was an immediate hit and Osborn became a popular business guru. The underlying assumption of brainstorming is that if people are scared of saying the wrong thing, they’ll end up saying nothing at all. Typically, participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contribution.

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The PersonalBrain - A Knowledge Management Software Tool

There is a plethora of Mindmapping software tools out there but PersonalBrain, using the metaphor of the working brain connecting neurons (in this context - parent thoughts) to a series of child thoughts (thoughts associated with the parent thought) offers a very simple moving functionality that allows the user to move from parent thought to parent thought in the process making connections a static mind map isn't able to do.

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Want to be really creative? Stop thinking about yourself - Wallace Immen, The Globe and Mail

Necessity may be the mother of personal invention, but thinking about others can lead to more creative and useful ideas, according to new research. The findings have important implications for employee management as well as personal brainstorming, said Adam Grant, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “People who focus on others tend to be more creative than those who are just out for themselves, because focusing on others forces you to consider a wider range of perspectives,” said Prof. Grant, who conducted the study with doctoral student James Berry of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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10 Steps To Susccessful Brainstorming - Paul Williams Circa 1957 - How Something Old is A New Again

10 Steps to Successful BrainstormingI found these great brainstorming tips in the June 1957 issue of The Rotarian magazine via Google Books. The original article was entitled: “Got A Problem? Brainstorm It!” by Lyman Judson. It is no surprise that what we read about in 1957 is what practice today. As Judson’s article points out – even though brainstorming dates back to Plato, much of what they did in 1957 and what we do today is based on work by Alex Osborn.

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New Ideation Software Management System - Kindling

It is not often we recommend ideation software platforms promoting innovation and collaboration as in the main most of the existing platforms are unwieldy and have proved pretty inept at doing just what they claim to do - facilitate better idea evaluation. However Kindling Idea Management looks like it might be an  addition worth exploring in the already crowded ideation software market place. Click here to have a look at their site.