Virtually Anyone Can

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What would the world be like with “frictionless” creativity? What if we could easily engage with practically anyone, anywhere, at almost no transactional cost? How would that impact our capacity to connect with and catalyze our creative colleagues all over the world?

Without geographical constraints you could access talent from anyplace around the globe, while staying put in exactly the place where you choose to be. The economic costs of an office could be eliminated, or at least the expenses of meetings and business travel could be minimized. The environment would thank you for reducing your carbon footprint. Yes, you’d have to account for the cost of people’s time, but that could be classified as an investment with a potentially high return, especially if innovation can thrive, despite – or as a result of – the diverse perspectives of a virtual team. Keep reading »

Defining Brainstorming

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A recent Newsweek article sparked an age-old debate between two camps in the innovation field: those for and against brainstorming. The term dates back to 1930s, when Alex Osborn first employed organized ideation in the advertising agency he headed. In his book, Applied Imagination, published in 1953, Osborn defined brainstorming as “a creative conference for producing a list of ideas – ideas which can be subsequently evaluated and further processed.”

Five years later, in 1958, Yale University conducted a study to test brainstorming and concluded that brainstorming individually was more effective than brainstorming in a group, but it was widely misinterpreted as “brainstorming didn’t work.” The Yale study created a debate that has percolated for fifty years. Does brainstorming work or not? Does a group generate more and better ideas than the same people would if they were working individually? Keep reading »

A Smaller Sandprint

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A recent Sandpit on the topic of energy efficiency gave us reason to pause and consider the carbon output of our own work. Given that we travel to hotels or meeting venues to work with our clients, and that very often the people we work with are collected from far-flung locations to come together for innovation workshops and sessions, it dawned on us we might be churning out a fair amount of CO2. Keep reading »

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