We often talk about Great Ideas here. Great Ideas create relevant solutions that go beyond expectations. But not every Great Idea finds a ‘home’, in fact, the basic idea (what does it do and what is in it for me) is often just not enough to get it from the drawing boards into development.

The 6 principles of Great Ideas show the key qualities of ideas made to survive. Ideas that get adopted and cared for by your consumers, clients and/or key decision makers. Continue reading »

One of the most common conflicts in creative teams is picking the initial idea to be developed, and get everyone behind that single idea.

Sometimes this is a smooth process. If one of the ideas is already a combination of ideas from various people on your team it usually doesn’t take long to get everyone enthusiastic about it. It becomes more difficult when individuals won’t accept an alternative to their own solution. This can become a real problem when the reasons why the idea doesn’t get accepted remain unclear. Continue reading »

About 3 months I started the idea of blogging about my big passions: Ideas & Creativity. I just love to create, facilitate and manage ideas and noticed a lot of my theories and methods were helpful and valuable to people around me. Basically jumping into the small gap between ‘creatives’ who want to organize their ideation, and people looking to be inspired and kick-start their creative thinking.

One of the pillars of the insights and methods Crinid will present is ‘the anatomy of the idea’. Its my take on the concept of ‘an idea’. What makes a ‘good’ idea and how can we be more in control of creating these great ideas? How can we make the process of ideation more tangible, train it and generally become better creative thinkers? Continue reading »

Brainstorming is without doubt the most commonly used technique to generate great ideas. But a common misconception is brainstorming is as straightforward as listing random thoughts and pick out the best of the bunch…

The goal of this article is to explore & explain the actual how and why of ‘the brainstorm’. How does it work and why is it such an effective method? For the conditions and rules of conducting a brainstorm see one of the previous articles: ‘The 10 commandments of brainstorming’.

Waves of inspiration

The goal of every brainstorm is to generate creative, new solutions to a problem. Ideally you have gathered a team of 4 to 10 people to participate in the brainstorm. You’ve appointed a reporter, a leader and the participants and are ready to go.

But where do you start, wand what exactly constitutes as a good brainstorm? Continue reading »

Whether you are a designer, marketer, coder, or anyone else who is expected to have creative ideas – you probable know this feeling. Staring at your screen, sheet of paper, scribble on a memo and liking what you see. Your idea seems to make sense, you’ve got all angles covered, no question about it – this is your best idea yet.

Then this nagging voice in the back of your head creeps up on you. Will others like it just as much as you do? Will they see the sheer brilliance of your idea – can everyone appreciate your creative outburst or is your intellectual input refined enough. Time for some feedback…

You turn to the person next to you and ask: “Be honest, do you like this idea?”. Continue reading »

A brainstorm can be a powerful tool to create great ideas. However, it’s not uncommon brainstorming is seen as ’20 minutes of fun’ – like it’s not a real business meeting just because you are creating divergent ideas. These brainstorms can harm the reputation of the technique as the productivity of sessions organized this way is very low.

Fortunately, saving the reputation of brainstorming is easy. These are the ten commandments for organizing and participating in a productive brainstorming session:

1. You will be on time
2. You will have an agenda
3. You will appoint one participant as the scribe
4. You will have no distractions or interruptions
5. You will be clear about the goal of the brainstorm
6. You will not recognize ‘ranks’ in a brainstorm session
7. You will time your brainstorm
8. There will be no discussions during the brainstorm
9. Remember brainstorming is about quantity, not quality
10. You will have a back-up plan

Continue reading »