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When starting your own company, or if you’re already in business and are looking to come up with some new, fresh ideas to keep up with modern trends, you and your partners, colleagues, and employees might need to brainstorm. But what exactly is brainstorming? How can it be carried out in a more inventive way?
Here, we’ve made a guide on brainstorming in business, and provided some tips on how you can keep it interesting to ensure the ideas keep flowing.
Brainstorming is a group method of problem solving using lateral thinking. It’s often considered quite relaxed and informal, and encourages input from everyone taking part. This input is then used to come up with ideas for the group to use, or else will be used to spark off more creative ideas that could lead to a result further down the line.
Brainstorming activities can often help people to “think outside the box”, see things from a new perspective, and get them to open up and be receptive to new ideas. As such, experts often suggest that ideas in brainstorming sessions shouldn’t come with any form of reward or criticism. This is because deep analysis or judgement at an early stage may limit or discourage creativity and idea generation.
Any ideas brought up during brainstorming activities should be evaluated at the end of the session.
Group brainstorming sessions are often a perfect way to generate business ideas, whether you’ve only just started out or even if you’ve been successful for a long time. It means you aren’t limited to your own thoughts, every team member involved gets the chance to speak up and be listened to, and you can collect the rich selection of ideas and examples provided to come up with a solution that works best for your company.
When handled correctly, brainstorming in business helps teams to bond, work in a way which is fun, and solves problems in a positive and rewarding environment.
There are a number of different brainstorming techniques you can use to pull together as a company and come up with brand-new business ideas to suit your needs. If the concept is new to your firm, you may wish to start with a basic brainstorming activity, which we have explained below:
If you’d like to come up with something more creative for your brainstorming session, there are a number of techniques and activities you can implement, so you always know you’re making the most of your time in a way that will be beneficial:
It’s often considered easy to carry out analytic brainstorming in business, owing to the fact that most people will have built on these techniques and taken part in activities based around it while they were still at school. When you choose analytic brainstorming techniques, you’ll be working as a group to analyse the problem at hand and using the tools you have available to come up with a creative solution.
Examples of activities you might choose to carry out a session include:
In some cases, you may find that your colleagues, partners, or employees can’t schedule a brainstorming session. In others, you might find that more introverted members of the group are not sharing their ideas over more extroverted members. Some group members may also find it difficult to speak up about ideas if they think others won’t approve.
In these cases, you may think about activities which allow group members to generate business ideas without having to announce them to everyone. Examples of these include:
By creating role play scenarios with problems your business is facing in mind, you may be able to come up with a range of solutions to solve them. Examples of role play activities for brainstorming include:
These techniques help to ensure that everyone in your group is included in sharing ideas, and that the process is carried out in a structured, supportive manner. Activities you might consider for this include:
Using more creative techniques might help to get ideas flowing when you’ve been stuck on the same problem with no solution for some time. These techniques and activities include:
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