Businesses live or die on their ability to solve problems, both internally within the company, and externally for the benefit of potential clients or customers. And, as the pace of technology and competition is increased, so is the need for more ideas and innovation.
Instinctively, managers and business leaders turn to “brainstorming” because it offers the promise of producing a lot of ideas quickly. Or, at least, that’s what lots of people still think.
What is brainstorming?
Brainstorming was the ironically solo brainstorm (brain-drizzle?) of Alex Osborn back in the 1950s. His innovative “don’t criticize” approach to wasting whole groups of people’s time was so popular that many businesses still do it to this day.
Yet, as innovation researcher Dr. Tony McCaffrey points out, “No study has proven that brainstorming works well, even though it has been the go-to method for idea generation since 1953.”
Jonah Lehrer, journalist for The New Yorker, goes further saying that brainstorming flat-out doesn’t work. He points to a 1958 Yale study that found students working by themselves came up with “roughly twice as many solutions as the brainstorming groups,” and a panel of judges deemed their solutions more “feasible” and “effective.” Ouch.
Brainstorming is broken:
- People come up with more ideas when they generate them alone.
- Lack of criticism encourages first-level thinking and obvious ideas.
- Groups distort thinking — extroverts unduly influence conversations.
But that doesn’t mean people should generate ideas alone in a vacuum. Research also shows that constructive criticism pushes people to come up with less obvious, more creative — i.e., better — ideas. And that’s where a social platform like tibbr creates a space to both submit ideas and receive civil criticism, effectively streamlining idea production.
tibbr makes innovation easy.
tibbr makes it easy to continually solicit, share, build upon, improve and manage ideas without worrying about anyone unduly skewing the discussion. And because great ideas can come from anywhere, tibbr lets anyone weigh in, regardless of their position, department or location. With tibbr, everyone has an equal voice and an equal opportunity for their ideas to be heard. tibbr makes generating ideas cost-effective, too — Forrester Consulting reported in their Total Economic Impact™ study that tibbr reduced the cost of innovation and idea management by 30% over three years.
So see how tibbr can help your company be more innovative — get a free trial of tibbr now.
