Breaking Away from Cluster Brainstorming
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A couple weeks back I had posted a unique way to come up with great ideas. I have received many emails in regards to other techniques for brainstorming.
One very effective way I find to brainstorming is really going through the process of thinking dumb. Yes I said dumb. Thinking dumb means you aren’t being critical of your thoughts, and you are no longer controlling the way your mind should work.
Lets, as always, put this into a scenario. Lets just say I work for ACME Cars, and we need to innovate our cars so we can continue to compete with Mercedes Benz and BMW. As always we start with a blank canvas. Lets take a normal piece of the car and think dumb.
I have decided to pick tires out of all things. But what about the tires? They are round and they roll. Simple concept. But what if they were squares? What would happen? Well surly anybody knows that the ride would get really bumpy. Yes of course really really bumpy. So how can we make the ride less bumpy? Well we can calculate at what time, depending on the speed of the vehicle when the bump will occur, send that signal to the shocks to compensate for the bumps so it becomes a smoother ride. Ok so we may not make tires round, but the whole idea of predicting bumps sounds interesting to me. What if we could predict road bumps in advance, then send the signal to the shocks to get ready for the road impact. We could place a sensor, or a lazar, or maybe even sonar to predict those bumps. Now we can give our customers a more controlled ride. We can call this technology, “clouds”.
Perfect there we have an example of thinking stupid to get a great innovative idea. Obviously it has a lot of bugs, but it is surly a way to get started.
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