In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm. Jump Associates. The Rise Of Unconventional Brainstorming. New York Times reports of a new wave of brainstorming consultants that are being tapped to help businesses develop new offerings and come up with solutions on their challenging problems.
By conducting unconventional exercises and training sessions, these firms help their clients ‘self-diagnose’ their problems and generate ideas to solve them. Jump Associates is one such company that teaches creative thinking and boasts of a high profile clientele. The Times explains how they helped GE employees think of a new revenue source for its aircraft-engine division. Jump didn’t just conduct brainstorming discussions. As the week neared its conclusion, and as the participants started becoming increasingly antsy, Jump sent them shopping.
So what’s the reason companies are lapping up idea generation more than ever before? One school of thought holds that corporations both rise and die faster than ever today, placing a premium on the speedy generation of ideas. Searching the Brain for the Spark of Creative Problem-Solving. Twig: Twig. With Twig’s Noter, you can make notes simply by typing them.
Want to revise an old note? Just start typing its name. Twig is smart about abbreviations and shortcuts. Every note can have as much text as you need, and as many tags as you desire. You can add your own attributes to notes. The Noter shows you a list of related notes and a topical word cloud. Adapted detail from a series of lecture notes by Dr. (Click to close) The Twig Map gives you unprecedented freedom to make notes and express relationships exactly as you want. Link gracefully within your document, and from your document to any file, Web page, or internet service.
The Twig Noter gives a two-minute overview of this simple, flexible tool for quickly capturing ideas. Mapping with Twig explores Twig’s map view, showing how informal clustering keeps your ideas organized even as your understanding changes. For a quick tour, watch Stacey Mason’s screencasts on notemaking with Twig. Einstein’s Secret to Amazing Problem Solving (and 10 Specific Ways You Can Use It) Einstein is quoted as having said that if he had one hour to save the world he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.
This quote does illustrate an important point: before jumping right into solving a problem, we should step back and invest time and effort to improve our understanding of it. Here are 10 strategies you can use to see problems from many different perspectives and master what is the most important step in problem solving: clearly defining the problem in the first place!
The Problem Is To Know What the Problem Is The definition of the problem will be the focal point of all your problem-solving efforts. As such, it makes sense to devote as much attention and dedication to problem definition as possible. Problem Definition Tools and Strategies The good news is that getting different perspectives and angles in order to clearly define a problem is a skill that can be learned and developed. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Category:Creativity Techniques. This A to Z of Creativity and Innovation Techniques, provides an introduction to a range of tools and techniques for both idea generation (Creativity) and converting those ideas into reality (Innovation).
Like most tools these techniques all have their good and bad points. I like to think of these creativity and innovation techniques as tools in a toolbox in much the same way as my toolbox at home for DIY. It has a saw, spanner, hammer, knife and all sorts of other things in it, they are all very useful, but you have to pick the right tool (creativity / Innovation technique) for each job. This site will try and provide a little guidance along with each tool to let you know whether it's best used for cutting paper or putting in nails. For the future, the aim is to also have sub-categories which will identify Techniques for; Problem Definition - including problem analysis, redifinition, and all aspects associated with defining the problem clearly.
Subcategories. LEGO SERIOUS PLAY - BUILD YOUR WAY TO BETTER BUSINESS.