BrainWaves is a quarterly e-periodical for people who are interested in how organizations cultivate individual and group creativity. Each issue of BrainWaves features information and perspectives about individual and group ideation; how businesses and not-for-profits actuate the best ideas; and reports on remarkable innovations that promise novel solutions to intractable problems. Brainwaves is produced and edited by BrainReactions, producer of “outside insight” — ideas for organizations conceived by outside professional brainstormers and from online brainstorms using BrainReactions.net. 

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In This Issue

• Web Tools for Innovation
• Innovating for a Better Tomorrow: One Laptop Per Child
• Unleash the Creativity and Effectiveness of Electronic Ideation in an Online Brainstorm
• Forty Tips for Better Online Brainstorming
• The Buzz about Crowdsourcing

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Contributed by Anand Chhatpar

The Internet has become a powerful resource for any innovator, and there are a variety of online tools available to help you with various stages of the innovation process.

Let’s go down each step of the process and see examples of tools on the web that can be used along the way:

1. Opportunity Identification: For discovering opportunities to innovate and for finding areas of need and untapped demand, use the following websites:
ePinions.com: Reading consumers’ reviews and complaints about certain products tells you which problems could be valuable to solve.
Inventory.Overture.com: Searching for keyword terms and phrases on this website tells you how many people searched for that phrase and similar phrases last month on the Yahoo network. When you get the number of searches, you can triple it to get the approximate number of total searches worldwide. If you find an interesting phrase that has high searches but not too many websites serving the need, you’ve found a good niche to innovate within.
Trendwatching.com: This website tells you about trends happening in the business world today that you could align yourself with to take advantage of their popularity. Every trend highlights the opportunities for business that lie within.
SpringWise.com: Another great website from the people who run trendwatching.com, which features interesting new businesses starting up around the globe. If you see a successful business in another country that could apply to your country, it is a clear-cut opportunity and you have lower risk because the business model is proven in another market.
Emily Chang’s Ehub: Emily does a great job of cataloging the latest Web 2.0 applications in her Ehub database. Many of these applications have become instant hits with the online audience and one can detect amazing opportunities by looking at the adoption rates of applications like Twitter.
Ethnography using YouTube.com: Who said watching YouTube videos all day doesn’t have business value? If you watch enough videos of people on YouTube using everyday products like skateboards or brooms or any personal care products, you will start observing trends and opportunities. For example, why do people still fall on ice during the winter? Shouldn’t this several thousand year old problem be solved by now?
BrainReactions.net: Using our online tool at BrainReactions.net, you could do a survey with your target audience to ask them what new products or services you could create for them. You’d be amazed at the number of opportunities you can uncover by directly getting in touch with your target customers. People like to talk, give feedback and brainstorm. Just launch your question and invite them into the conversation to see the results!
PewResearch.org: This website has an incredible database of research polls conducted across dozens of categories on hundreds of topics. Their reports uncover trends that can be used to pinpoint new opportunities.

2. Brainstorming: Once you’ve found areas of need and opportunity, your next step would be to brainstorm solutions that you can create to meet the need:
BrainReactions.net Brainstorming Rooms: You can use private online brainstorming rooms to brainstorm ideas with your friends, coworkers and even your target customers. You can not only add your own ideas but also sort and rank them. Simply launch a new brainstorm within your brainstorming room, invite the participants and let everyone collaborate.
If you prefer making mind-maps instead of group brainstorming, there are alternatives to BrainReactions.net like Mindmeister.com, bubbl.us, and MindJet.

3. Research: Once you have brainstormed a list of ideas and sorted them into top concepts, you probably want to do some more research on the most promising concepts in order to finalize on the top concepts you will create prototypes for. The following tools will help you with further research:
Wordtracker.com: Entering a keyword or keyphrase into wordtracker gives you a list of similar terms people search for online, and also provides you with an analysis of which of those keywords has the least competition, so you can easily get the highest search engine ranking for that term.
Patentmonkey.com: A much nicer interface than USPTO’s own patent search, which allows you to not only check out the patents related to your idea, but also find out their status to know whether the patents are currently active, abandoned or expired. Google also has Google Patent Search, but it does not tell you the status of the patent yet.
SpyFu.com: Competitive intelligence for your keywords that tells you approximately how much money your competitors are spending on pay-per-click ads and what terms they are using for advertisement.

4. Prototyping: With your research, hopefully you have narrowed down your concepts into the top 3 to 5 that you will take to the prototype level and test with the market. The following websites will make your prototyping task easier:
eMachineShop.com: Website that provides you a free CAD tool to design your product and to upload your design to them so they can actually manufacture it and ship it to you. You can order just one piece or a thousand, and the pricing varies according to materials used. The beauty of this software is that it gives you instant quotes when you are designing the prototype, so you can adjust it to make it cheaper.
eLance Photoshop artists: The eLance freelance talent market has a number of photoshop artists who can make a life-like looking image of your product or service idea using photoshop and image manipulation. Making the poster for a product in this way is much cheaper than making the actual product and allows you to test the market quickly and cost effectively.

5. Validation: Now that you have your prototype, your next step would be to show it to your target customers and see if people would like to buy it. You would do this before spending large amounts of money on R&D to make the product.
Kancept.com: Brilliant website made by master inventor Osman Ozcanli that allows you to upload a product concept photo and see an approval rating from a broad target audience. This website is like hot-or-not for product concepts.
Vizu.com: If you need more sophisticated answers and more granular survey audience targeting, you can use Vizu.com that allows you to conduct a distributed survey on the web for a very low cost.You can upload your product concept image and ask any question to your survey audience, so this tool can also be used to determine target pricing and other factors.
eBay.com: Here’s a brilliant idea coming from Timothy Ferris, author of the Four Hour Work Week. Ebay.com, the popular auction site, can be used to test your concepts quickly. Tim uses Ebay to post pictures of the concepts and guages the interest from the market by looking at how many bids he receives and what prices people are willing to pay for this product. He cancels the auction just before it ends and pays a small fee to eBay for doing so, but gets a lot more valuable market research in the process.

6. Implementation: Arguably, the hardest part of any innovation process is to fund, staff and execute the implementation plan for the product concept. Here are some online tools that can help:
Prosper.com and Zopa.com: Online markets for loans that allow people to get personal loans at reasonable prices from a large number of individual lenders. You can post your product concept here along with your funding request and if you find many “investors” who believe in the product, you will get the funding for it, upto $25,000.
GoBigNetwork.com: This online community connects entrepreneurs with angel investors and other people who can help with implementation of a new business.
eLance.com: If you can break down the implementation plan into a series of detailed steps, chances are that you can outsource most of those steps to highly qualified yet cost effective freelancers you can find on eLance.com or similar talent websites.
LinkedIn.com: The largest online professional network, LinkedIn has experts in every given area you can imagine.
Amazon Web Services: Jeff Bezos & Company have done a great job of providing a group of web services that can be very useful to entrepreneurs and innovators. In additional to scalable storage and computing, Amazon.com also has a drop shipment service they call Amazon Fulfillment. So, if you have a product that sells online, you can ship the container to Amazon, they will store it, package it and ship it directly to your end customer for reasonable costs. You can even automate the process programmatically because Amazon has a powerful web services API.

No Comments | Creativity & Brainstorming, Managing Ideas, Innovation Techniques, Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

Contributed by Julia Styles

Ever since I heard about One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and the $100 laptop a few years ago, I have been excited about where innovation trends are leading us as a global community, towards opportunities for better access to education and means of poverty alleviation. Although this may be a utopian thought, I appreciate any real step in the right direction. I applaud Nicholas Negroponte for his vision and further more for the execution of the $100 laptop. According to BBC columnist Jonathan Fildes, OLPC is finally putting the $100 laptop (which currently costs $176) into mass production, and should be in the hands of Children as early as October 2007.

Even critics are joining the cause. Intel, whose chairman once called the laptop a “gadget,” recently partnered with OLPC to manufacture its memory chip. Other partners include Google, Red Hat, and AMD.

OLPC designed the laptops with developing world conditions in mind, and has been testing them in Nigeria and Brazil. I recently read a news report titled “Nigerian school without power receives 300 laptops.” The article highlighted the pitfalls of having laptops where electricity is scarce and irregular. The article confused me considering the $100 laptops can be charged with solar or human power. They have also been designed to use as little power as possible, with no hard drive and a low-power screen.

I am excited to see how the One Laptop Per Child movement takes off. Please read “$100 laptop production begins” at the BBC to learn more. Or visit the OLPC website. OLPC is a nonprofit organization with a mission to advance education in developing countries. If you would like to support OLPC click here.

Other organizations are also finding ways to improve conditions in developing and war torn countries. Check out Concrete Canvas, the winner of the Saatchi and Saatchi Award World Changing Idea of 2005.

Please email BrainReactions if you know of other innovations that are helping developing countries.

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Contributed By Darin Eich Ph.D.

Electronic ideation — coming up with multiple ideas using a computer and software or web application — offers a powerful new tool to innovators. With Web 2.0 internet technology available, a form of electronic ideation known as online brainstorming is also emerging as a “front end of innovation” tool for innovators.

Capturing ideas in a structured fashion can increase efficiency and streamline the innovation process by making the ideas easier to analyze. Electronic ideation is an alternative to traditional brainstorming within an organization, which often conjures images of lame sessions where the first ideas mentioned are often discussed for a long period of time, criticized ad nauseum, and subjected to political and power interests. Unfortunately, many such brainstorm sessions result in few ideas, because most of the time was spent analyzing the ideas and talking about why they wouldn’t work. In addition, people are hesitant to suggest their own ideas in person, especially creative or unconventional ones. Challenges like this give traditional face-to-face brainstorming a reputation for futility within organizations and their culture. Research shows that the brainwriting (writing ideas instead of saying them) approach to idea generation can be more effective within organizations, perhaps because it diminishes the repressive or stifling effects of corporate culture.

Electronic ideation or online brainstorming combines current technology and the benefits of brainwriting for an effective idea generating approach. Structured brainwriting through electronic ideation can work for groups of people, or communities of interest, who may not be in the same place at the same time. Electronic ideation is a conceptual outgrowth of the anonymous suggestion box. Anonymous suggestion boxes have been around for a long time to solicit humdinger ideas at no risk to the contributor. Now the suggestion box can become the brainstorming table for participants who are specifically invited to participate, overcoming space and time limitations. The challenge, instead of dealing with corporate culture, is to motivate people to respond to an invitation, to log into the brainstorm “room” to suggest their ideas. Electronic brainstorming is a tool that can be used in a variety of ways, producing a new surge in ideas from employees.

When brainstorming online, community of interest and response time must be managed properly; place is less relevant. You can conduct electronic ideation with many brainstormers at once; it is scalable from one to thousands of people. More than 10 people around a brainstorming roundtable are extremely difficult to manage, but you could get 1,000 people to log on and submit ideas on an ideation web page that poses your question. You define the community of interest and the brainstormers you invite to participate. These can be the usual suspects in your department or project team, all people in your company, your customers or a user group, or other people across the globe that could usefully suggest ideas. In a world that is flattening, as Thomas Friedman says, a hosted application gives you the ability to get the perspective and ideas from people anywhere in the world 24/7. Also, on the other end of the spectrum there is tremendous value with having a tool that allows people to record their ideas on their own when they generate them.

Response time matters. You can certainly use the electronic ideation tool on a no deadline basis. But having a set time for participants to contribute ideas is motivating and offers the facilitator a reasonable chance to analyze the contributions. Specifying the time limits in the e-mail invitation is very effective in a virtual brainstorming session. Complete the brainstorm in an hour or a day, and then move on with analyzing, testing and implementing good ideas. You can, of course, open follow-up brainstorm rooms to build on previous rounds of ideation.

Electronic ideation frees participants from spatial constraints. Brainstormers could be anywhere in the world, but you could also conduct a roundtable brainstorm electronically. A formal electronic ideation or online brainstorming tool like BrainReactions.net can even allow you to see fellow brainstormers ideas in real time during the session you create. This offers opportunities to build and extend on ideas and to recharge and spark creativity in new directions. What if you brought people physically together in your conference room or a stimulating location and facilitated a face-to-face brainstorm where people entered their ideas into the online software system? This may be a preferred use of ideation software. Imagine gathering a group of 7 to 10 people around a table. One computer is projecting the brainstorm question and space for ideas on the projector screen. Each person enters his or her own ideas. There is no need for the proverbial flipchart sheets and marker that slows the session down to a crawl. Since idea generators are typing their ideas as they conceive them, the pace of idea generation and the quantity of ideas are greatly accelerated. Since each person has his or her laptop the brainstorm session is no longer slowed by 1920s technology of a flip chart and pen.

When someone has a really good idea they could say it aloud as stimulus for extensions of that idea. The most creative people and the most conventional are often reluctant to share their output. Capturing them electronically avoids the tendency to suppress them out of fear or embarrassment. Ideas from the ends of the spectrum are valuable. The creative ones can spawn great innovation and the seemingly boring ideas are most easily understood and implemented.

I challenge you to open your innovation thinking to establish electronic ideation as a part of your innovation system to employ both the benefits of internet technology and brainwriting methodologies. Think of it simply as a tool to capture ideas on your own in your office on your own time. Consider the possibilities of bringing laptops to the brainstorming table. Idea generation is both art and science. Creativity is heightened in great brainstorms. The productivity of brainstorms can be supported and enhanced using tools that come closest to allowing brainstormers, working individually or in groups, to produce and record ideas at a pace much closer to “mind speed.” In group ideation process there is a high correlation between the quantity of ideas generated and the quality of ideas, so speed truly counts. Electronic brainstorming such as BrainReactions.net is an efficient, intuitive way to produce great ideas.

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Contributed By Darin Eich, Ph.D.

In the true spirit of online brainstorming, I created a brainstorm on BrainReactions.net and used it as a tool to write this article. I keep the article format as an organized list of tips. You can view the original brainstorm process I used at http://www.brainreactions.net/brainstorms/1556 and even suggest your own ideas or tips.

1. Brainstorming is different than Q&A. It is about multiple ideas instead of a single answer, so approach the process with quantity in mind.
2. Each individual submits multiple ideas.
3. Multiple individuals submit multiple ideas.
4. The person who creates the brainstorm should start it off with at least 5 ideas.
5. Follow the traditional brainstorming rule of going for a high quantity of ideas.
6. Set an individual goal to create 20 ideas (like I’m doing here).
7. Understand that a concept can be broken down into smaller ideas and these ideas can be mixed and matched…so the parts have value.
8. When creating a brainstorm invite others to join.
9. Set an actual structured time for people to log in and brainstorm live.
10. During a live brainstorm it is exciting to see other ideas being added alongside yours, this motivates people to generate more ideas.
11. Set a goal to involve at least 8 people in the brainstorm.
12. Show a previous great brainstorm example to people.
13. Allow people to click a link that shows them an example of a quality brainstorm while they are brainstorming, this will give them a model.
14. Do not judge or put down ideas while you are brainstorming.
15. Click on the “good idea” button for good ideas.
16. Take one of the good ideas you select to the next level.
17. Build and extend on ideas presented earlier in the brainstorm.
18. Quantity is needed first to be able to unleash the power of building and extending, so add a number of ideas even if they may already exist.
19. Google for insights while brainstorming.
20. Stay focused on the question and topic.
21. If an idea is off topic, though, accept it because the focus is on the process.
22. Take a risk by submitting a pretty far out idea…do this intentionally as a part of the process.
23. Submitting a far out idea is fun and motivating and can encourage creativity.
24. Put some motivating music on in the background while brainstorming (see ideas of songs to try in the most ideated brainstorm on the BrainReactions.net website).
25. Drink some coffee while brainstorming!
26. Call a friend for ideas.
27. Try to synthesize previous ideas into a theme to brainstorm from.
28. Try to synthesize a couple of ideas into a further developed concept.
29. Practice brainstorming tools to help you generate ideas, like SCAMPER.
30. Brainstorm from your laptop in a place that is creative and energizing for you…I’m doing this now from my favorite coffee shop.
31. Look around your environment for ideas.
32. Accept the same idea from multiple people, this still has value, it tells you it could be important.
33. When brainstorming online, organize your thoughts and ideas into a logical sequence and present them in that way.
34. Create a mindmap of ideas relating to the topic or question and add them online in a more developed way.
35. Focus on process, your individual process for generating a high quantity and quality of ideas, and the brainstorm process as a whole that encourages different people.
36. Seek a diversity of individuals to submit ideas.
37. Create a question that is open enough that many idea alternatives are possible.
38. Give more background to the question in the space provided; this will help people understand the desired outcome for doing the brainstorm.
39. Use a few ideas here and there to model good ideas that match the question; they can even be existing ideas.
40. Step away from the question for a moment to let your mind recharge and reload ideas and return to power them out.

No Comments | Creativity & Brainstorming, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Managing Ideas, Innovation Techniques, Gen-Y ideas, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, Innovation Training, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

Contributed By Julia Styles

Crowdsourcing has been the buzzword of the summer. With the continued growth of Web 2.0, crowdsourcing has become a viable method of obtaining information and skills from the masses.

What is crowdsourcing?
According to wikipedia, “Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a job traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call.”

It is essentially outsourcing to customers and other average people, usually via the web or an organization.

Who uses crowdsourcing?
Famous users of crowdsourcing include YouTube, Threadless, Lego, iStockphoto, Digg, and Procter and Gamble.

As discussed in Connect + Develop, P&G employs more than 9000 scientists and researchers in corporate R&D and still has many problems they cannot solve, so they go to the crowds. P&G posts challenges on InnoCentive, offering large cash rewards to more than 90,000 “solvers” who make up this network of backyard scientists, according to Open Innovators. P&G also works with organizations that provide crowdsourcing or outside innovation, including NineSigma, YourEncore, Yet2, and BrainReactions.

BrainReactions and crowdsourcing
BrainReactions essentially is organized and controlled crowdsourcing. Companies invite us to participate in their front end of innovation, or idea generation phase. Not only do we provide them with the voice of the customer; we help them develop new products, packaging or marketing messages all under an agreement of confidentiality. This type of outside innovation works very well, because it comes from the customer, and it is less expensive than internal R&D.

Now BrainReactions offers crowdsourcing to anyone through our online social network for brainstorming — BrainReactions.net. Post your challenge in an open brainstorm room and invite friends and users to give ideas. Someone from the crowd might have the perfect idea for you.

Read more about crowdsourcing
The word crowdsourcing was first coined by Jeff Howe in a 2006 article in Wired magazine. Needless to say, Wired journalists have become experts on the topic. To read more on crowdsourcing check out all of these articles from Wired Magazine.

The Rise of Crowdsourcing.
Look who’s Crowdsourcing.
What does Crowdsourcing Really Mean?
Creative Crowdwriting: The Open Book.
Using Crowd Power for R&D.
News the Crowd Can Use.
The Experts at the Periphery.

To learn about specific strategies of crowdsourcing, check out Sami Viitamaki’s FLIRT model.

No Comments | Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Innovation Techniques, Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this