Contributed by Darin Eich, Ph.D., President, BrainReactions LLC http://www.brainreactions.com

If growth is priority number one, innovative thinking skills should be encouraged and developed at all levels of an organization. Sure, there should be a great emphasis on external or open innovation and many of innovative ideas can come from your customers or other subject matter experts. Nonetheless, it is the employees of your company who will connect those ideas and develop their own ideas within your innovation system in order to fill your pipeline on a continuous basis. The first place to open innovation is within your organization. Imagine what kind of culture of innovation your firm could have if every employee contributed to the innovation process at a place where his/her unique strengths aligned with your needs? A variety of employees can contribute to each stage of innovation by:

1. Providing insight to your research on problems and opportunities — the starting points of innovation—by sharing the voice of the customer with you.
2. Helping to clarify opportunities and focus on specific problems identified by the research.
3. Providing ideas through brainstorming sessions, individual submissions, or company wide idea generating events.
4. Helping to analyze and synthesize the massive amounts of idea collected by using specified criteria or their own wisdom.
5. Participating in a live or interactive web event where employees can view the concepts they developed, and then help select which ones reach the innovation pipeline.
6. Helping to communicate and advance the leading concepts by contributing their thinking to make the message a memorable one.

Do your team members know simple activities they can do in each of these stages? From our experiences, we have found that it is simple and even empowering to equip people with these tools and show them how to utilize them by practicing with real-life challenges. Participating in innovation is something we all enjoy doing—often a reason for choosing our career. People want to develop ideas! In our program, we have turned college students into innovators for innovation leader P&G™ in a handful of training sessions. By doing this, we increase the number of tools they have in their “innovation thinking” toolbox, and build the strength of those tools, resulting in more and better ideas!

How is “innovation thinking” happening in your organization? Who is doing the “innovation thinking”? The simple vision of an organizational innovation culture is to engage as many people as possible — from within their organization as well as outside of their organization — in “innovation thinking” about the opportunities and challenges that they face. Innovation — for those that practice it at its best — is not about one guy in a garage working on an invention, but rather a process where multiple people are collaborating to develop and validate ideas. The opportunity from the top of the organization is to open and catalyze this innovation engagement.

If opening up innovation and innovative thinking within your organization is an opportunity, how do you develop it at all levels and places? We have found that the best way to do this is not to read a book or to listen to a lecture, but instead to engage in developing real-world innovation. Facilitate employees — step-by-step, activity-by-activity — while utilizing different innovative thinking tools, to create and develop their own ideas. What if each individual in your organization had their own personal innovation project? What if employees, along with their colleagues, were invested in the development process of small group projects on a regular basis? We bet it would be good for the innovation culture, employee retention and, most importantly, growth!

From our experience training innovators for Fortune 500 projects, we have found that the most prolific innovators exhibit many innovation thinking skills, including:

• Systems Viewing
• Rapid Iterating
• Quantity Making
• Judgment Suspending
• Idea Funneling
• Deconstructing and Constructing
• Building and Extending
• Connection Making
• Outside Insight-ing

If your organization is at a place where employees at all levels are engaging in innovation in many contexts — such as organizational improvement, product development, communications, etc. — then the next opportunity is to engage the people outside of your organization to collaborate with the developed and engaged innovators on the inside. This collaboration can be powerful for enhancing both “innovation thinking” and results at all stages.

Dell is engaging customers in submitting ideas to them at Ideastorm.com. Intuit has created IntuitLabs.com to show lead users the prototypes they are working on. This effort provides validation and encourages feedback for further development.

In sum, to grow, you need to innovate continuously and sustain this innovation so new and better ideas flow through the pipeline. To have better ideas you need to have a higher quality of innovation thinking from more innovation thinkers both inside and outside of your organization. You can develop this capacity through simultaneously teaching and engaging employees and other individuals in your innovation projects. Start by having a common innovation system that a variety of employees know how to use. Also, have a common format for ideas and how they advance down the innovation pipeline. Then, provide a wide variety of employees with opportunities for real challenges to help them contribute to innovation for actual projects.

About the author: Darin Eich, Ph.D. is President of BrainReactions LLC and founder of InnovationTraining.org. BrainReactions Innovation Training can help you create a program to teach, facilitate, engage, and guide your team step-by-step through this innovation system and over 30 different interactive activities to help you generate ideas and solve your challenges. Email Dr. Darin Eich at darin.eich@brainreactions.com

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Contributed by Darin Eich, Ph.D., President, BrainReactions LLC http://www.brainreactions.com

We have heard from many people that the importance of communicating your idea is becoming of critical importance! It is the communication that takes the idea into action. Many times, we have a great idea, and we’ve developed it thoroughly, but we are unable to communicate it so that it gets advanced. Odds are, we didn’t communicate it in a way that works with people’s minds. They didn’t get it so they didn’t feel comfortable being a part of it. The answer is simpler. Tell a story. Make it visual. Make it understandable. Help them get it. You should be able to do it in one sheet.

Here is an example. We launched a new training program on idea communication. People had to “get it.” To convey the concept, I had the idea of telling a simple visual story, with me as the main character, through a comic. I chose myself because I know that character well and because I had a few photos of myself! You innovate with the resources you have, right? The comic was easy to make with a few pictures that could convey some situations that we can all relate to. I knew the comic would gather attention because as I was building it at a San Francisco coffee shop, I had two strangers come up to me to ask me what I was doing. This has never happened with writing text! Here is what I created:

From this one visual sheet a person should understand the value of this training. See how we communicated this new training workshop and even participate in the webinar program in a simple visual website at http://ideacommunication.org. Once you create the story and visual, you can use it for articles, the web, live presentations, etc. We launched the training program and it was our most successful yet — so the communication achieved the real ultimate action outcomes we needed.

If you are taking idea generation and innovation seriously, you should take idea communication really seriously because it is what prevents our ideas from happening! These are idea communication problems you may face in your work or organization:

• A great idea doesn’t go anywhere because people don’t understand it or are not motivated to collaborate on it.
• New ideas don’t get put into action internally or externally.
• A new product or service launch requires new and more creative ideas than before.
• Change is happening faster and new communication ideas are continually needed.
• You need to present and persuade with your ideas simply and memorably so others can take a risk.

We would like to help you not only with your idea generation & development but now with your idea communication too so you can bring your innovation into action. Visit http://ideacommunication.org to see more about our training on this important topic. We can bring it live to your organization or you can participate in the recorded webinar program whenever you are ready.

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Contributed by Anand Chhatpar, Chief Executive Officer, BrainReactions LLC http://www.brainreactions.com

There are many entrepreneurs and corporate innovators in the world who have had a new idea that actually garnered significant success in the market, and yet, they cannot explain what exactly caused them to succeed. Succeeding, but not knowing how they did it, makes it very difficult for innovators to create repeated success stories. This leads to the question: How do we create repeatable innovation success?

From all the research that I have done in this field, I believe that one of the best processes for achieving repeatable success is the one presented by Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur who now teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford and UC-Berkeley. His process is described in his book, Four Steps to the Epiphany, and is also popularized as the process of “Customer Development”.

Steve Blank’s lecture at Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Series on this topic has been made into a Podcast, that I would like to share below:

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Contributed by Darin Eich, Ph.D., President of BrainReactions LLC http://brainreactions.com

Innovation is creativity with a purpose. It is not only creating new ideas but doing so with a specific intention in mind and with plans to actually launch the developed and realized ideas into the world. There are elements of both creation and action. Innovation should be simple, understandable, and open for a wide variety of people to engage in the process. Innovation is becoming more open, less closed door R&D sessions, and more engagement of actual customers, stakeholders, subject matter experts, and employees at all levels in the process. Many organizations know how to launch and sell their products and services but are “fuzzy” on the front end of the innovation process: the stages that deal with creating, analyzing, and developing ideas. That is why it is known as the “fuzzy front end.” The key to making this important beginning stage of the innovation process less fuzzy and more practical is through articulating a simple system with activities that a wide variety of stakeholders and collaborators can understand and engage in. The fuzzy front end should be more kitchen table and less scientific lab.

Having a clear system is equivalent to systematically generating ideas on purpose. I will share with you what we have learned while developing a simple “front end of innovation” process that we have been training people in from over 200 companies at InnovationTraining.org. We encourage you to learn innovation through doing it. You can practice and use this process to develop and communicate your big idea in a more systematic and effective way. The projects we have done for a wide variety of companies from P&G and the UN to solo entrepreneurs all use a similar system and activities. They all started with a problem or opportunity, led to brainstorming questions, continued with ideas, and led to selection and development of the best ideas…just like you catalyze your own projects in your own organization.

If you want to develop an innovative idea for your project, where do you start? Start with a proven system of innovation best practices. The diagram above shows the steps involved in a basic innovation system that you can use as a starting point. You will then go about this purposefully with a process or system to develop your ideas into more validated and robust concepts. You would typically generate multiple ideas and then synthesize relevant multiple ideas logically together in the form of a well-developed concept.

It is important to capture and store all of these ideas in one place. Also, great innovations are not solitary work. They are the result of collaborations. Involve others to help you generate ideas, develop the concept, validate the concept, and communicate the concept so that it is meaningful and memorable. An example of the front end of innovation can be found in a brainreactions.net private online brainstorming room, you can pose your question, provide background information, visuals in the form of a photo or video, and generate ideas. With the online brainstorming room you can include up to five brainstormers and these brainstormers can not only generate ideas but also vote, select, and sort the best ideas to move forward and develop. This is a way to involve collaborators in your innovation system.

An important start to an innovation project is to crystallize the problems and challenges that you intend to solve. You must pose important questions that are grounded in the problems or opportunities for innovation. Google launched a campaign that solicited concept ideas to change the world. To use Google’s Project 10^100 framework as an example, they offered seven suggested categories and questions:

1. Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
2. Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
3. Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
4. Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
5. Health: How can we help individuals le ad longer, healthier lives?
6. Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
7. Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?

These are examples of categories and related questions to start. These categories were selected because they offer real problems and opportunity. These are starting places, if your vision is to “change the world” then the seven Google categories and questions may be beneficial starting places for you. Odds are that your questions and categories may be different and related to the problems or opportunities that exist for you or your organization, specific to your mission. These starting places are big questions of their own or can catalyze sub-questions for you to purposefully generate ideas on.

Action to take: Clarify a simple system you will use to innovate. Use the model we are presenting or customize your own. Know that you are engaging in a system to innovate and what that system is. Identify and write down the areas you would like to innovate in. These are problems or opportunities. Research them. Create questions to ask.

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About the Author:

Darin Eich, Ph.D. is President and founder of BrainReactions LLC that provides innovation training through InnovationTraining.org

This activity is a part of BrainReactions Innovation Training. BrainReactions Innovation Training can teach, facilitate, engage, and guide your team step-by-step through this innovation system and over 30 different interactive activities to help you generate ideas and solve your challenges. You can learn our techniques and activities to do again and again on your own and contribute to a sustainable culture of innovation within your organization. Email Dr. Darin Eich at darin.eich@brainreactions.com to inquire about bringing training and facilitation into your organization or to do an event to capture the ideas of your employees, customers or stakeholders.

Do you want to learn more about systematic innovation? The Systematic Idea Generation for Innovation 4 part online workshop series has been popular with 200 different companies seeking to learn the language of innovation and generate new ideas. You can start this webinar series today at http://innovationtraining.org.

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Contributed by Darin Eich, Ph.D., President of BrainReactions LLC http://brainreactions.com

Sometimes we assess our professional lives and realize that we have just been operating a metaphorical machine for an extended period of time. This machine may not even be a real machine but what we discover is that our work, our organization, or our processes have become a bit stagnant or repetitive. We lose our excitement or even hope for the future because nothing is changing. We are doing the same thing every day, every month, and every year and this has become bothersome. We are doing precisely the same service, making the same product, doing the same marketing, giving the same speeches, and asking the same question every month and every year. When this repetitive stagnation happens it not only adversely affects our professional life but also seeps into our personal life. Hey, most of our personal lives revolve around our professional lives anyway, so when that isn’t good, little else is. What people need is change. This is the first thing. Staying in ruts is no fun, getting out of them is.

But change for what? Just change for the sake of change? Well, if we are stagnant, sometimes even change for the sake of change is a good thing because it starts an action. It will add a little bit of air and movement to break the stagnation and stops the mold from growing. But what is powerful, what can be downright compelling, is change when you have a vision, change when you see a potential for a purpose, change when there is a goal that attracts you and others like a magnet. When there is a new challenge, this awakens something in you. It may be fear, but that usually comes about first anytime change happens. So, connected to that fear is excitement and also a newfound hope and perhaps, invigoration, in your professional life. This vision, this purpose, this goal gives you a destination to strive for. It gives your mind a reason to start thinking again. This can be invigorating for anyone!

What is the ultimate for a person’s professional life is this thing called innovation. Innovation is changing. Innovation has a goal, a goal to get better. Innovation can happen in a lot of different contexts. You can innovate new or existing products. You can innovate your marketing. You can innovate your services. You can innovate your business processes. You can innovate your organization as a whole. Most compelling, motivating, and inspiring is that you can also innovate yourself as a person. Yes, all of these things have the capacity to change, to grow, to develop, and to improve in slight ways and in ways that you can’t even tell the difference!

Work and organizations can be stifling. People complaining about their jobs and companies are as common as conversation. Some of the people who work at the large established bureaucratic organizations are full of great life though. This is because they work in innovation. They are concerned with innovating products, services, and everything else. They look to innovate everything they see and realize that they, with others, have the capacity to actually do it. They have that challenge, that goal, that purpose, and that vision in their professional lives and I can see the difference in these people. My conclusion: innovation is good for a person and involving yourself and others in innovation in your organization and life is a positive change.

Where do you go from here?

1. Assess. Is your professional life stagnant? Is there a lack of change or growth in the stuff that you do and in your organization, heck…in your own life too?
2. If you assessed that yes, change is needed…well change for what? What can be changed for the better? A product, service, process, organization, or you? Perhaps all of these things could use innovating.
3. What is the purpose connected to a vision connected to a goal for this change?
4. Start innovating.

OK, so what does “start innovating” mean? To say “I’m going to innovate” is exciting, certainly. Saying this to yourself in the mirror each morning is a little weird but will probably have some good effects. I’m a leadership geek. I’ve studied leadership for a number of years and it is a really fuzzy thing that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Innovation is similar to leadership. They both have some similar meaning and they both get a “huh” response when you ask people for a definition. What I’ve found to be helpful is to take this fuzzy concept and break it down into its parts. So for innovation, let’s break it down into some different stages. Many different organizations and individuals define innovation in different ways, have different systems, and have different parts of these systems. In general though, some similarities exist.

Let’s break it down simply.

Stage 1: Identify the opportunity or problem that will lead to the innovation. This requires some hard thinking and some research. What exactly is it that you are trying to innovate? Is this the correct thing that you should be going for? Make sure that the “innovation for what?” question is answered here and gather a fair amount of information. This is your background research stage.
Stage 2: Formulate questions. Because you’ve done stage one you should have a much more thoughtful understanding of the situation, problem, or opportunity. Start breaking that problem down into it’s pieces and formulate corresponding questions. So, if the problem is that nobody knows about your organization and thus cannot do business with you, a simple “how can we get more people to know about our organization?” is a question that can be broken down into “who do we want to reach”, “what we want them to know,” “how do we communicate this message,” “how can we use the internet to communicate this message,” etc. There are a lot of ways you can break down the problem once you’ve gone through that first stage of understanding it and thinking about it.
Stage 3: What I like best; it is the “coming up with a bunch of ideas” stage. You do just that. Take each question, organize them in a way from more general to more specific, and come up with a bunch of ideas for each. Utilize many different ways of coming up with ideas from just writing some down on your own to using a group brainstorm if possible. The goal here is to literally come up with hundreds of ideas.
Stage 4: Make meaning of all those ideas you came up with and analyze them.
Stage 5: Develop some solid concepts in greater detail.
Stage 6: Test out those concepts and develop them further based on feedback.
Stage 7: Take action and do what you had set out to do in the first place. Execute the marketing plan to increase awareness about your organization, if we refer back to the previous example.

Innovation is fun work and also challenging work. It is much easier to do if you can break it down into the stages and take each stage at a time. Many times organizations start but don’t finish. So do each step at a time and make sure you move up the steps and finish and actually take action! If you go through the stages what you will be taking action on should be pretty good because you studied and clarified the problem, you formed great questions, gathered a number of ideas, made meaning and analyzed the ideas, developed solid concepts, tested those concepts and improved them even more. This leads to a breakthrough innovation! Start innovating!

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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. BrainReactions also provides innovation training to help companies and individuals generate more and better ideas. 

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In This Issue

• Innovation and New Product Development in Do-It-Yourself Healthcare
• Healthcare Innovation using the Web
• 100 Tips for Improving Your Creativity: Top ideas from 15 different brainstormers
• Frost & Sullivan’s GIL conference on Growth, Innovation and Leadership
• Use short online surveys to gain direction and validation from your stakeholders before generating new ideas

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Contributed By Tom Garz – TG Ideas LLC

Are you looking for new product or diversification ideas for your company, particularly in this economic recession? Well, there is a hidden gem out there that you might be able to cash in on – Do It Yourself Healthcare.

There is a growing trend in the world for this DIY Healthcare, partly out of need and partly because people want to be more active in their own healthcare. As a gauge of public interest, Google gives the following results:
Symptom Checker - 1,630,000 hits
Do It Yourself Health Doctor - 34,200,000 hits

The do-it-yourself movement is not new. Some examples of how this happened before are as follows.

• In the early days of radio, average people experimented with their radios latest parts and gizmos. Thus grew Radio Shack and many other electronic parts stores.
• Similarly, average people wanted to be able to fix and maintain their cars themselves, instead of taking it to the car dealer for diagnosis and repairs. Thus grew AutoZone and many other automotive parts stores.
• Also, many people do fine on home repairs and modification with information and materials from Home Depot and many other home improvement stores.
• Same goes for tax preparation software, thus grew TurboTax.
• And the list goes on to the next big wave….DIY Healthcare!

The common thread above is that people were provided with just enough information and materials to do it themselves.

So here we are today with frustrated healthcare consumers and in the midst of healthcare reform. Some look at this as a problem, yet others might see this as a great opportunity. It might be the next do-it-yourself movement. For those who want to ride this new opportunity wave, read on.

Even if your products are nowhere related to healthcare, think again. Let’s say you’re an automotive manufacturer – think about it – you are experts in machine diagnostic software for your vehicles with many patents and trade secrets to prove it! Expand your viewpoint, and see if you could modify your diagnostic tools to work on the human body, or even pets and farm animals! Sounds like good opportunity to me for new patents, patent continuations, etc. If you don’t want a piece of this new action, you could sell your patent rights on your new technology and pour this new money back into your automotive products.

If you are a healthcare product manufacturer, it makes it that much easier, in some ways. You might have to break out of the mode of thinking that healthcare professionals are the ones calling the all the shots now. Yes, they still are and always will be, but that seems to be changing. Many people nowadays want/need the knowledge and tools to “doctor themselves” for the most part and only go to a healthcare professional as needed.

Here’s a few suggestions on how you can you be a part of this new wave as a corporate innovator or new-product developer.

Research Consumer Needs
Start with yourself and your family – Do you go to the doctor every time you have a malady….or do you try to fix yourself….and only go to the doctor if it doesn’t go away? Ask around how others do it, Focus Groups, etc.

Then go to Wal-Mart, Walgreen’s, or other consumer healthcare stores and see what knowledge and tools are available to do a better job in DIY healthcare. Not much, eh? Where can your company fit in to this obvious need?

Build on the work of others.
My Resources page shows what’s been done before - http://doityourselfdoctoring.blogspot.com/2009/04/do-it-yourself-doctoring-resources-now.html

Another resource is to find out the ingenious ways people doctor themselves throughout the world, particularly where there is no doctor. Check out Doctors Without Borders and Engineers Without Borders for possible new product idea leads.

Keep up on what the world is doing on this topic with news alerts.
One way might be to set up a daily Google news/blog search. Copy/paste the following search string into Google News/Blogs and see the interesting “new product idea seeds” you pick up - self-diagnosis OR self-diagnose OR self-medicate OR self-medication OR symptom-checker OR symptom-checkers OR telemedicine OR health-2.0 OR medicine-2.0 OR e-doctor OR e-health

Patent Search

• Find out what your competitors are doing.
• Use patents to brainstorm how your existing products might fit into this “Do It Yourself Doctoring” trend.
• Find possible merger and acquisition prospects to diversify your product/service portfolio.

For example, let’s say your company made flexible tubing for the now sagging automotive industry. You now need to diversify where your product could be used. Go to Google Patents - http://www.google.com/patents and enter the search string - (medical OR health) AND flexible tubing. From the results, brainstorm how your company could break into the health/medical area. Maybe your flexible tubing could be used throughout public healthcare kiosks, located in pharmacies, malls, and the like.

Another example, let’s say your company makes endoscopes already and you want to expand into telemedicine for possible home use. Go to Google Patents - http://www.google.com/patents and enter the search string - endoscope telemedicine. From the results, brainstorm how your company could expand endoscopes into home use.

Get Competent Help
Let BrainReactions know what you have in mind and let them help you with new products, programs, and promotion.

I look forward to using your innovations and new products!

Tom Garz

About the Author

Tom Garz, Manager TG Ideas LLC

Tom is recently retired, having worked as a Patent Searcher, Engineer, Electrician, Technical Writer, and variations thereof for many years.

Tom formed TG Ideas LLC in 2003 to “Help make this a better world by providing information to others on what has been done already and offer up ideas on what else might be done”. Tom does this by writing – three Blogs and other writing opportunities, one of which is for Brainwaves Emagazine.

Currently, Tom has three Blogs to help fulfill the mission above.

• Do It Yourself Doctoring Blog featuring “Tom’s Healthcare Reform Plan - Diagnosing and Treating Myself, going to Healthcare Professionals only as needed.”- http://doityourselfdoctoring.blogspot.com/
• Ideas for Products or Inventions is currently running a series of DESIGN NOTES FOR LOW-COST PRODUCTS for Low-Income People - http://tgideas.blogspot.com/
• Interfacing with the Doctor Within might be a little ahead of it’s time, yet I’m actively working on this too - http://doctor-within.blogspot.com/

Contact:
Tom Garz
TG Ideas LLC
691 S. Green Bay Rd. #180
Neenah, WI 54956
E-Mail - tgideas@athenet.net

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Contributed by Anand Chhatpar, CEO of BrainReactions LLC

The healthcare industry has been quite resilient to economic downturns and is expecting to see a growth in the market largely due to the large, affluent and aging “baby boomer” population. Several technological innovations are springing up in the healthcare industry to take advantage of this growth. This article is a showcase of innovations in the healthcare industry that are Internet based.

I have presented below online healthcare innovations in various categories that could help consumer patients and medical practitioners.

1. Online access to physicians and health experts:
http://www.hellohealth.com/ The site allows you to talk to health experts, schedule appointments with doctors, do virtual meetings with them and even do follow-ups online.
http://www.zocdoc.com/ Free website that helps you find and schedule appointments with local doctors. http://www.justanswer.com/ Ask a question and get an answer from qualified health experts or doctors. This site is not free, but is quite inexpensive to use.
http://www.americanwell.com/ Online care for consumers that provides 24×7 access to physicians. The cost of using this service is not clearly indicated on their website.
http://www.freemd.com/ Interact with a virtual video doctor who asks you questions about your symptoms and makes a recommendation to you.

2. Tools for self-service healthcare management:
http://www.sugarstats.com/ Helps you keep track of your sugar levels to manage your diabetes on your own.
https://www.mymedlab.com/ Helps you schedule and order clinical tests on your own. You can go to a local lab to give a sample and get the test results online.
http://doublecheckmd.com/DTHome.do Helps you find out if any symptoms or abnormal lab tests are caused by drug interactions or side-effects.
http://engagewithgrace.org/Questions.aspx Helps you answer 5 basic questions and lets your relatives know your preferences in case you are debilitated in a terminal illness.

3. Medical information repositories and search engines:
The following sites provide a large amount of information on various symptoms, diseases, preventions and treatments: http://www.webmd.com, http://www.medpedia.com/, and http://www.healia.com/

4. Support groups/Patients helping patients:
People suffering from the same ailment can learn from each other and find a support group that helps. Sites like http://www.inspire.com/ and http://www.patientslikeme.com/ provide that.
http://www.ratemds.com/social/ The RateMDs site helps you review and give a rating to your doctor. The aggregate ratings and rankings for doctors are also available for you to check out.

5. Electronic health records on the web.
Many companies are getting into the space of helping consumers get secure access to their electronic medical records. The following three companies are the major innovators in the field:
http://dossia.org/, https://www.google.com/health and http://www.healthvault.com/

6. Managing costs of healthcare:
https://www.changehealthcare.com Helps consumers track their healthcare bills, compare costs of prescriptions and doctor visits so they can save money.
http://healthcare.intuit.com/ Free health expense tracker that integrates with health insurance plans from Cigna and UntedHealthCare.

7. Social Network for doctors:
Doctors can find valuable insight from connecting with each other and collaborating on certain cases. These social networks are exclusively for physicians: https://www.ozmosis.com/home http://www.sermo.com/

The various web based healthcare innovations featured here are just beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible in the healthcare innovation landscape, especially given the pervasiveness of the web today. We expect to see more valuable tools in the future as the internet matures and as technology entrepreneurs focus on capitalizing on the growing healthcare market.

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Contributed by Dr. Darin Eich, Ph.D., Chief Operating Officer at BrainReactions LLC

A BrainReactions.net brainstorm launched by UKJohn (John Tunney) on “100 Tips For Improving Your Creativity” achieved its stated goal. It generated 100 ideas from 26 different brainstormers. The description of this brainstorm was: “I thought it would be interesting to ask BR Tool users for their creativity tips. Any input is welcome - be it favourite techniques, authors, websites, attitudes you think are essential for creative thinking, etc.”

The following are some of the most popular ideas from 15 different brainstormers tagged with the username of the creative global idea generator from BrainReactions.net. Note that the wording of the ideas, including any typos, have been kept intact below in an effort to maintain the originality of the idea as presented by the author:

Go beyond the word that describes the solution to purpose of the solution, e.g. instead of saying “I need a job,” say, “I need an income.” That frees you from confining boundaries. Ask yourself, “What’s the true purpose of this solution? Is there an alternative way to get that?”
-David_Payne

Ask every question you can think of related to the task at hand, problem or opportunity. This “drilling-down” will ALWAYS produce high-quality possibilities and answers – and crystallize your idea, problem or opportunity so you can produce very clear responses.
-ThoughtOffice

Try using outrageous similes to spark your imagination. Think up some, or read some fiction - either good or bad - to see what kinds of “word pictures” authors have crafted. Two I wrote last night: “ditched them like an empty pack of Marlboros” and “parted out like so many broken down Chevy Citations”. Play off the imagery that is inspired and try making some “like a” phrases of your own.
-Dlock

Mindmap your concepts…it is amazing to see all of the little ideas that relate together to make a big idea. This helps to integrate your ideas and helps you develop more robust concepts in the future
-Djeich

Don’t try to innovate in a vacuum. Look around at similar problems in different fields, and see what elements apply. Often, parts of a solution can be found.
-FreshThinker

Read biographies of high achievers in any field and emulate their thought-process.
-Anandvc

Keep a record of ideas, problems and thought experiments. Refer to the record regularly and sometimes memorise the items so that you can think about them at any time at any place.
-UKJohn

have a time limit, say by 10th of this month i should generate 10 ideas. this competitive thinking will enable you to be focussed and will help generate more ideas.
-soorya

Leverage the 4 fundamentals of Innovation: FUNDAMENTAL 1 - Innovation happens at the intersection of domains and fields, FUNDAMENTAL 2 - Breakthrough ideas come from playing with ideas and forming new connections, FUNDAMENTAL 3 - Incubation is a powerful and important part of any innovation process, FUNDAMENTAL 4 – Brainstorming is a skill to be practiced and perfected
-ThinkCubologist

Switch to unlined paper for all of your meetings, brainstorming sessions, and notebook idea entries. It will subconsciously - and consciously - free you to think differently and more expansively. Also, it facilitates more visual drawing of ideas - not just linear verbal descriptions - which is particularly useful for novel, emergent ideas that are still in the process of forming. Once people experience unlined, they don’t go back
-CreativeEmergence

Go to a nice and new environment where you feel happy and excited, and synergize with interesting people there;this gets the creative cells sparkling. Feeling good and sharing your thoughts open many windows of opportunities. The impossible becomes possible.
-Stephens

Go Random. Where ever you are think of at least seven things… anything, no rules. Write those things down without judging or sensoring. You may use visual, auditory, musical or personal reference, For example, the next thing someone says or the next thing you hear on the radio, song or talk show subject. List those seven things and relate them to you end result. How, Why is it related to your issue. Why? This process opens fresh new pathways to success.
-Huemankind

Consider the opposite: Turn the problem upside down; imagine trying to achieve the opposite; reverse the relationships
-Graham

Backwards script-writing: imagine the result of your idea. how will it look? how it will influence on your market? then, go backwards and look for more ideas to make it happen.
-Ranencarmel

Build a rough prototype. It will help focus your goal and serve as a platform for generating more ideas in creating and extending.
-Emooney

Visit the online brainstorm at http://brainreactions.net/brainstorms/1753 to review the ideas, select good ones, and sort to view the most popular. You can also still add your own tips for improving your creativity.

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Contributed by Dr. Darin Eich, Ph.D., Chief Operating Officer at BrainReactions LLC

We are about to innovate. Is there anything missing or something we hadn’t thought of? What direction should we move in? How do we gain quick insight and validation to decide which questions we want to generate ideas on when innovating for new products or services, marketing, or organizational improvement? If you’ve ever thought about these questions before launching a new innovation effort, a short and quick survey of your customers or stakeholders may be what is needed.

One activity to use before formulating your brainstorm questions is to do a quick survey to get both “write in” ideas as well as selected answers. The answers help you validate the direction you are moving in and the write in ideas may shed light on any blindspots and provide something you hadn’t thought of. Gathering a dozen responses to a short survey of no more than five questions that can be done in a couple of minutes can help you zero in on your direction for innovation before the brainstorm and on the concepts to invest development time in later.

SurveyMonkey is an effective and free online tool to help you conduct quick, short surveys to gather insights and validate the direction you choose for idea generation and innovation. It allows for your customers to co-create with you in a more engaging and interactive format. In our webinar series we delve deeper into activities like this to help you innovate in a direction that is co-created and validated by your customers. We share more activities like this the new seminar series package.

To provide a real example, we do online innovation workshops. We are seeking to create new webinars that match our expertise and our client’s needs. The most recent webinar series (http://InnovationTraining.org) we did was created based on feedback and insights from clients on which topics they wanted us to cover and how to cover them. We are now looking for new insights to determine what to create next so we created a short survey. See for yourself and take a few minutes to do this short survey and see an example of a web tool for innovation you can use for free:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=WnApQvAZmevimoKRFFg0gg_3d_3d

The key is to keep it simple. You are looking for a direction to move in and new ideas. A four-question survey can do this. People can fill it out in a couple of minutes. Before generating ideas try to ask people in your network to clarify the challenge that they want solved through the survey. In addition to emailing a group you can also collect short survey insights through Twitter, Facebook, your blog, and other social media avenues that would allow people to simply click on the link to give you feedback on the specific innovation challenge you are working on. A short SurveyMonkey survey can be used before the idea generating stage to identify and clarify the challenges to solve and after you generate ideas on that direction to help focus in on which solutions to invest in developing further.

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