The innovation box is the simple concept behind any brainstorm. The innovation box is the realm in which people pull from their ideas - the larger the box, the greater number of new ideas or solutions one can come up with. Within a professional organization, one almost always comes up with new ideas and solves problems within their innovation box. The scary thought of all of this is the longer one operates within a specific industry or job the smaller their innovation box is going to become; they will no longer seek creative ideas but operate solely on past experience. It is at this time that creating new ideas or better yet creating change within an organization, something essential for any companies survival, becomes one of the most difficult things in the world to accomplish.

So what can an organization do to break down their current innovation box and build a bigger box in its place? The easiest thing a company can do is to seek the opinions of today’s youth and college students. These individuals do not have a tainted view on the world, we fully believe that anything is possible. We operate in a HUGE innovation box. This is BrainReactions, a collection of the most creative college students who operate with a healthy disregard for the impossible. In any given hour of a brainstorm we are going to come up with 200-300 ideas, of which a few may really stick with your company. But the real value of the process comes when the people at the company are listening to and reading the ideas and it gives them a bigger innovation box to work in. They begin to form connections within other areas of their company that they never thought to operate in, they find that one innovation to the product that will push it over the top; and best yet, listening to the new ideas pour in they have completely ripped down their innovation box and built a much bigger one which they will operate in for several months and years to come.

Another way to break down this innovation box is to find the most creative people within an organization and teach them the value of the brainstorm and coming up with ideas that are so far out of the box they are in an entirely different world. Let me give you an example to show you the value of operating in a huge innovation box and having individuals that can operate in this state of impossibility. Let’s say my organization is trying to come up with a solution to hang Christmas lights.
- I want a flying saucer to come in and whoosh by my house and all of a sudden all of the Christmas lights are up
- I want a football that I can throw and the lights would unravel automatically around my tree or on my house
- I want magnets attached to my house that connect with parts of the Christmas lights so I can throw the Christmas lights at my house to attach

Looking at this very crude brainstorm it is obvious that the first idea would never work, but it got the individuals in the brainstorming room thinking about ways Christmas lights could be thrown into the air and automatically attached. You can see a logical path of ideation from impossible to fairly good idea. If this were a real session I could only imagine that the people in charge of the Christmas lights would take this to an even more logical progression of not having the users throw the Christmas lights but have magnetic pieces that could be taped with the house and connect with their Christmas lights which one would have to stand on a ladder to apply. So as you can see, although the first idea would never work it created a huge innovation box for the brainstormers to operate in and eventually would lead to a very logical idea that the company could use.

| Creativity & Brainstorming, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Innovation Techniques, Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, Innovation Training | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

One Response to “The Innovation Box”

1. danlarson Says:
   January 27th, 2007 at 12:39 pm

   One of the keys for building a bigger innovation box at large corporations is getting an effective facilitator. I’ve been in rooms full of geniuses that produced nothing because they were lead into the fog by a poor facilitator. I cannot overstate the need for a TRAINED facilitator who knows how to pull ideas from smart people. In most companies there is not a career path with “brainstorm facilitator” at the top. This is a problem if you are trying to build a bigger innovation box. I advocate for companies to either go external to find a facilitator or train some internal resources. At the end of the day, I think a well-trained internal resource would be invaluable.

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