Concept development - Idea generation - Brainstorming

How to run the brainstorming session:

Rules:

• Postpone and withhold your judgment of ideas
• Encourage wild and exaggerated ideas
• Quantity counts at this stage, not quality
• Build on the ideas put forward by others
• Every person and every idea has equal worth

Ideas:

• are both to serve as possible solutions AND to stimulate ideas in other people
• are expecting strange and impossible which will spark off workable solutions
• value weird and bizarre ideas

Warming up:

• ask people to approach a non-related topic to 'warm-up'
• The purpose is to get minds thinking in a flexible and creative way
• examples are: "Generating new features for cars" or "Generating new features and gadgets for the kitchen" or "Generating new television programmes"
• Anything fun, stimulating and, most importantly, not job related
• for about 5 to 10 minutes

Session:

• Open the session proper by asking for as many ideas and suggestions as possible
• Write every one of them down
• Tell people to write them down on their own pads of paper if they think they will forget before it can be written down "officially"
• Then start asking for radical ideas, ideas which will work in a strange way and any ideas which just spring to mind for no apparent reason
• Remind people to use other people's ideas as a springboard for their own
• Get them to read the current ideas and expand on them radically
• What is the strangest way of solving the problem?
• want the ordinary ideas too
• Keep telling them how well they are doing when they come up with new ideas, especially when the idea is very weird
• Lightly tell the group off if they criticize or sound shocked at the ideas
• Glance from person to person, catching their eye in a pleasant way and smile
• Do not call people by their names because this reduces the group bonding
• Use "we" when you speak
• silent periods are fine, light conversation to the other participants will help them speak out again and will stop them feeling like they are breaking the silence
• Move back to the ideas listed, pick an interesting one and put that to the group asking them to expand, modify or remodel it
• Group will need a break. The time this takes could be as little as ten minutes or as much as an hour
• Don't force people to stay for two hours just because the room is booked for that long. Stop when you are finished.
• When the break is over ask people to sit in a different place, greet their new neighbours and then start again. Remind people of the rules and the purpose, then ask for suggestions

Try to change the process:

• to create small groups around different flipcharts and brainstorm around the ideas on it, then they can move on to the next one
• get people to write their ideas on a piece of paper and hand it to the next person to build on those (or distribute randomly)
• use advanced software

End the session:

• catch everyone's attention and ask them to finish off their writing
• Thank them
• Let them know that you will be collating the ideas in a large list and analyzing them to find out which ones you will use. You can offer to send the list to them if appropriate

Post-session work and idea analysis:

• arrange ideas into three lists - Excellent. Definitely will work and can be implemented immediately. Interesting. Will possibly work or may require further analysis to decide if it will work. Needs more investigating. May work in the future. Useless. Will not work.
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