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

• How to innovate and brainstorm a better idea to change the world for a share of $10 Million from Project 10^100
• Utilizing the Labyrinth for innovation and convergent thinking in the Conceptual Age
• The Labyrinth: An ancient and emerging tool for idea development
• Review: Frost & Sullivan conference on Growth, Innovation and Leadership

Announcement:

BrainReactions’ most popular webinar, Fundamentals of Idea Generation for Innovation, which has been attended by over 100 companies already, is now available to watch as a video so you can watch and learn from the webinar video at your own convenience. To download this webinar and the related materials, please visit http://training.brainreactions.com

No Comments | BrainReactions News, Creativity & Brainstorming, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Managing Ideas, Innovation Techniques, Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Marketing to college students, Marketing to young women, Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, Innovation Training, Managing Generation Y, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

Contributed by Darin Eich, Ph. D.

Google has committed $10 million to fund ideas from individuals that can improve our world. This article will help you to use best practices for idea generating and innovation so that you may submit a better and more well developed idea to increase your chances for a share of the $10 million and better improve the world. We will pull out key parts of the Google application for topics you can generate ideas around and criteria to use to select and develop your ideas. We will also share with you what we have learned from experience not only crowdsourcing ideas but developing a simple idea generating for innovation process you can use to develop and communicate your big idea in a more meaningful way. We have developed and used this process with similar projects that were geared at improving our world, be it eradicating extreme global poverty with the UN, fundraising for the United Way, helping children’s shelters in developing nations, or bettering our environment. These projects all started with a problem, led to questions, continued with ideas, and led to selection and development of the best ideas…just like you can do with the Google Project 10^100.

In a Google news release they described this project in these terms: “Google is announcing as part of its tenth birthday celebration Project 10^100 (pronounced Project 10 to the 100th), a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible. For this challenge we are asking our users to send us exciting ideas for ways to improve people’s lives and have committed $10 million to turn up to five of the best ideas into reality. These ideas can be big or small, technology-driven or brilliantly simple – but they need to have impact. We will identify the 100 best ideas and then ask our users to vote on which ideas we should fund. Their votes select the 20 finalists, and then a panel of judges will choose up to five ideas for final funding.” For more information, visit: http://www.project10tothe100.com

If you want to submit an innovative idea for this project where do you start? First, practice innovation best practices. You will have to go about this purposefully with a process or system you use to develop a fine concept. This means 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 is meaningful and memorable. In a free brainreactions.net private brainstorming room you can pose your question, provide background, visuals in the form of a photo or video, and generate ideas. With the free 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.

So, how do we come up with a large number of ideas so you can develop a strong concept? First of all, we do it deliberately and purposefully. If you expect a bunch of brilliant ideas to come to you by chance, you are not going to get very far. You have to set out to come up with these ideas; schedule time to do it; plan to do it. Schedule a brainstorm or innovation session time, invite your collaborators, and execute.

An important start to an idea generating for innovation project is to pose important questions that are grounded in a problem or opportunity for innovation. Google’s Project 10^100 offers 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 lead 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?

Start by selecting a category that you are passionate about, value, and have knowledge or experience in. Brainstorm many specific problems or opportunities within that category. For instance, on a similar project we picked the “environment” category and then brainstormed solutions to the plastic bag problem as something to dig deeper into with ideas. You can view an example of this plastic bag brainstorm at: http://www.brainreactions.net/brainstorms/1815

This process example that you can see includes a question stimulated from a problem, hundreds generated ideas, collaborated ideas from multiple people, selection and voting of good ideas, and sorting most popular ideas. This simple process is valuable for creating better and more innovative ideas.

When generating ideas it is good to create with criteria in mind. This will help you to create ideas that have a better chance of success because they are grounded in the criteria that have been established. Project 10^100 has suggested five criteria:

1. Reach: How many people would this idea affect?
2. Depth: How deeply are people impacted? How urgent is the need?
3. Attainability: Can this idea be implemented within a year or two?
4. Efficiency: How simple and cost-effective is your idea?
5. Longevity: How long will the idea’s impact last?

You can select your top ideas from the brainstorm (by hitting the “good idea” button” on brainreactions.net) based on not only your passion for that idea but by how well it fits with the criteria. If it has reach, depth, attainability, efficiency, and longevity then it is a tremendous idea! The criteria will also help you to compare ideas to determine which to develop further.

You also need to do more than just develop a great concept. What is often times missing in success is being able to communicate your concept so that it is understandable, valuable and memorable. The Project 10^100 application is simple. They do though ask you to provide more about your idea or concept on key questions. Many of these questions are deserving of their own brainstorm to converge on the best ideas or answers. These questions from this Google Project are:

What one sentence best describes your idea?
Describe your idea in more depth.
What problem or issue does your idea address?
If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how?
What are the initial steps required to get this idea off the ground?
Describe the optimal outcome should your idea be selected and successfully implemented. How would you measure it?

You can also create a short video to explain your big idea. The more visual the better to help others’ minds connect with and understand your concept. Use metaphors, evidence, stories, and examples. You can also use the brainstorming process to create a video, generating ideas for both top-level video themes and the supporting details to reinforce the theme.

So why is it so important to have a process that yields a lot of ideas instead of just one that you get by chance? Generating many ideas is a process-oriented feature of very successful innovation systems in lots of successful organizations. When they develop new products they get many, many ideas in the pipeline. From there, they qualify the ideas and whittle them down into a handful of concepts. After that, they test the concepts while developing them more and may only end up with 1 new product from 100 product ideas. This is how ideation for innovation works. More importantly, when you come up with a large number of ideas it is easier to do good analysis. You can identify some themes that a lot of the ideas shared. Some ideas will lead to new and different ideas. You will learn a lot from looking at all of the ideas from above. You will see the forest from the trees. An innovation process is necessary to develop a better big idea.

Why not carry the Google idea competition inspiration forward? With brainreactions.net you can also run your own version of the competition. Why not do the same thing at a smaller scale and provide funding for ideas to help your organization or your local community? With crowdsourcing the connections can now be made between individuals and organizations. The technology and time is ripe to open up idea submissions and competitions from normal people with great ideas.

About the Author: Darin Eich, Ph.D. helps organizations to develop and facilitate idea generating & front end of innovation systems and programs. He also speaks and trains individuals in innovation, brainstorming, creativity, and leadership. You can email Darin at darin.eich@brainreactions.com.

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Contributed by Darin Eich, Ph.D.

A labyrinth is a reflective tool, a moving meditation if you will. It is a patterned path that you walk. While you walk, you think. You think very clearly. You gain insights. You think through things better. This is my experience walking labyrinths and utilizing them for my own personal innovation work. The last time I remember having a similar powerful experience walking and thinking was mowing the lawn which involved constantly moving in a pattern towards the center. My mind was full of ideas and thought during this experience and the labyrinth has generated similar effects for me. The labyrinth is a good weekly personal practice or a good tool for a group to use. Labyrinths can be used for a variety of purposes. The ability to use them individually and with groups for the purposes of convergent thinking, decision making, and innovation have become increasingly pertinent. Some thinking techniques like the labyrinth are ancient but readily applicable today.

I’ve used the labyrinth as a very powerful creativity, thinking, development, and problem-solving tool with a number of different groups of people seeking to innovate their own lives and organizations. When I need to work out a problem or think about something and develop it deeply, I journey to the labyrinth for this silent reflective walk that is very different from a group brainstorming session. This labyrinth walk is a moving, personal and inner thinking tool that I try to utilize on a regular basis. I have also been involved with using the labyrinth at a variety of leadership retreats and with teaching people innovation and creativity. The application can be equally powerful for individuals walking alone as it is for a group walking together. The group silence that typically accompanies a labyrinth activity is a new powerful feeling to experience.

I’ve also noticed labyrinths making their way into popular literature on innovation and creativity. Most interesting to me was seeing a number of pages devoted to the labyrinth in Daniel Pink’s tremendous book, “A Whole New Mind”. This is probably one of my favorite books relating to innovation and how individual thinking can contribute to it. The leadership and personal innovation skills for the new era he is presenting resonate with me. Dan says the keys to success in this upcoming “conceptual age” are in developing and cultivating six senses: design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning. The tools of innovation and the labyrinth align well with his six senses. How interesting would it be to create new interventions and programs designed to develop these capacities in people? One idea is creating a program designed to help people understand, articulate, and create their own stories. The labyrinth would be an excellent tool that can help people think through their own stories and work towards developing these important capacities and outcomes necessary for success and meaning in the conceptual age.

The labyrinth is starting to gain increased recognition for its role in helping to foster creative ideas, solutions to problems, and the development of innovative concepts. Read the article from Professor and Labyrinth researcher, Katja Marquart, for more information on labyrinths and how some people are using them for enhanced creative problem solving. Why not walk a labyrinth yourself and see how it may help you think more clearly. To find a labyrinth near you, search the World Wide Labyrinth Locator at http://wwll.veriditas.labyrinthsociety.org/

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Contributed by Katja Marquart

Harnessing creativity, innovation, and problem-solving techniques in a fast-paced environment is a highly valued skill in today’s world. Although each of us possesses the ability to be creative and innovative, we each access these skills differently. Factors such as the environment in which we work, the amount of time available, and our personal state of being, greatly affect our overall productivity and problem-solving process. Often, we rely upon tools and various practices to facilitate this process. Around the world, many people are turning to labyrinths as a unique tool for enhancing creativity and problem-solving processes.

Labyrinths are often confused with mazes. Without a visual reference, this confusion is understood, as the terms maze and labyrinth are often used interchangeably. However, following a maze involves navigating through a series of paths, dead-ends, and multiple turns eventually leading to a goal that solves the maze. Contrary to this, labyrinths consist of one very clear path winding around a central area. This same path is then followed back out from the center to complete the labyrinth journey. Many people who experience labyrinths find that navigating this single path creates a right-brain experience that differs from the left-brain, decision based experience of solving a maze. There is nothing to solve in following a labyrinth, you simply experience the journey.

Labyrinths have a long and rich history. As ancient patterns, labyrinths have evolved into modern tools with numerous uses. They have been found in cultures around the world and throughout time, with earliest documentation found in the Minoan culture, second or third millennium BC. In most contemporary applications labyrinths are created as walking paths or finger-tracing patterns. The labyrinth pattern defines a unique space, offering individuals a focused place for personal reflection and centering, as they physically experience walking or tracing the labyrinth’s winding path.

As creative problem-solving tools labyrinths may be used in a variety of ways. Many people find the experience of walking or tracing a labyrinth to be quite relaxing, allowing them to feel centered. This inner-calm encourages a flow of ideas emerging from subconscious levels of thought. The steady winding of the labyrinth’s path also reflects the divergent and convergent nature of thoughts during creative problem solving. Following the labyrinth’s path, draws one tantalizingly close to the center, when suddenly making a turn guides you towards the outer edges of the labyrinth and far away from the center. As this journey unfolds, the path maintains this rhythm until the center is finally reached.

“Relating labyrinths to creativity is not new”, notes Janice Francisco, a facilitator in the field of Creativity and Change Leadership. Francisco states that labyrinths have often been fixtures at international creativity conferences. However, she became interested in how and why labyrinths were related to creativity when she observed that, “a specific link between labyrinths and creativity was never explained at these conferences.” This observation launched Francisco into a deeper examination of labyrinths related to creativity, resulting in authoring the useful text, “A Creative Walker’s Guide to the Labyrinth”.

Francisco also opts to use finger labyrinths over larger labyrinths made for walking, a decision based upon the nature of her work. Francisco often has limited time in which to facilitate a productive session. Finger labyrinths pique curiosity and provide a tool for her clients to use as a grounding exercise and to facilitate certain types of the creative problem solving process. Specifically, Francisco finds that labyrinths are best used to help clients incubate ideas, or generate questions or information in response to a question that she may pose. She describes her use of the labyrinth as, “a vehicle by which we get to an outcome.”

Using small-scale labyrinths isn’t the only way to achieve effective results when working with corporate groups. Tricia Pierce, another labyrinth facilitator, believes the physical experience of walking a labyrinth with the entire body enhances the creative process in a different way than with finger labyrinths. Pierce often works with an artist who creates the labyrinth pattern on-site before the facilitation process begins. She believes using site-constructed labyrinths provides an experience that is more authentic, connecting the walker’s feet directly with the floor or earth.

Pierce describes her facilitated walks as very, “process driven”, where she “creates opportunities for awareness and presents task-driven challenges evolving into a defined plan by the end of the walk.” Pierce also integrates team process theories, team building exercises, and community building activities with her sessions. Pierce has also developed a game utilizing the labyrinth as a means of brainstorming. Her goal with this game is aimed at getting participants to experience and see things differently so they might approach their problem-solving task from a different perspective. Utilizing the labyrinth as a game produces successful group results, and the game has since been adopted by other labyrinth facilitators for use with brainstorming.

Labyrinths exist in a variety of shapes and sizes, some of which are thought to be more conducive for specific types of brainstorming, problem-solving, and creative ideation. Perhaps one of the most significant design elements affecting all three of these processes is the overall length of the labyrinth itself, which directly impacts the amount of time it takes to complete the journey. Labyrinth patterns (and their resulting size) are frequently differentiated by the number of “circuits”, meaning the number of paths counted from one edge to the center (or center to one edge). An eleven-circuit labyrinth takes more time to complete than a seven-circuit labyrinth. One of the most popular labyrinths in use today is an eleven-circuit design called the Chartres Labyrinth. This labyrinth was originally installed in the floor of Chartres Cathedral, France, around 1200 AD. This path offers a longer journey that some facilitators prefer to use when leading groups through problem-solving exercises.

On the other hand, the shorter experience offered with a variety of different seven-circuit labyrinth patterns is preferred by others. Francisco uses the seven-circuit Santa Rosa Labyrinth, designed by Lea Goode-Harris. Using this pattern has helped Francisco introduce the labyrinth as a tool for brainstorming and problem-solving, without discussing the full history of labyrinths, because she is able to focus more on the labyrinth as “a vehicle by which the group achieves an outcome.”

About the Author:
Katja Marquart is the Publications Chair for The Labyrinth Society, and works as an Assistant Professor of Interior Architecture at the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point, with a research emphasis on labyrinths and their applications in the built environment.

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Contributed by Anand Chhatpar, CEO of BrainReactions LLC http://brainreactions.com

I have attended and even spoken at many conferences in the past, but none of my previous experiences even come close to the delightfully invigorating and valuable event put together by Frost & Sullivan this year in San Francisco at their Growth, Innovation and Leadership conference ‘08. I think other companies that organize conferences for business leaders have a lot to learn from Frost.

Here are some key highlights that came out of the event for me:

1. High interactivity: The facilitated discussions and networking opportunities allowed me to learn directly from peers in leadership positions. Not only did I gain insight into what worked and what did not work for others in similar positions, but I was also able to connect a name and a face to each story that I learned from. That is invaluable because my knowledge retention here was very high. My knowledge retention from most conferences that focus mainly on presentations is fairly low.

2. Exemplary speakers: The speakers that Frost & Sullivan had brought together for this event were exceptional. One speaker that I had a chance to connect with, Mr. Murugavel Raju from Texas Instruments, himself embodies the ideas of “Growth, Innovation and Leadership” that Frost is promoting with the conference. Mr. Raju began his career as a small-time embedded systems engineer in India, and used his creativity to win a contest sponsored by Texas Instruments. TI offered him a job after recognizing his talent, and he has tirelessly climbed one peak after another within TI to reach his current senior management position.

3. Remarkable Team: The team from Frost & Sullivan that put together the event did a thorough job. Brian Denker from Frost is a very reliable young man who keeps everything running smoothly behind the scene. Joe Krumpfer is extremely helpful and jovial. I also had the distinct pleasure of having dinner with David Frigstad, Chairman of Frost & Sullivan, who is an inspiring entrepreneur. David started a market research company right after graduating from Indiana University and eventually bought the Frost & Sullivan brand. Everyone from Frost had a wealth of knowledge to share and ensured that each event attendee was receiving value by being there.

If you have attended a Frost & Sullivan conference already, I’m sure you will agree with my review. If you have not attended a Frost & Sullivan conference before, I would highly recommend it. They have already begun planning the next Growth, Innovation and Leadership conference and very soon will have these all over the world: http://www.frost.com/gil

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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

• Beyond a contest for the “best idea”: A case of crowdsourcing through a brainstorming competition
• What’s All the Fuss About Engagement?
• Knowledge Sharing Tool SnapAnswers.com insures against knowledge calamities
• Owl Analysis: A Metaphor for the first round of analyzing ideas for innovation
• Training Webinar for Innovation Through Ideation
• Frost & Sullivan conference on Growth, Innovation and Leadership

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

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

Open innovation is valuable because it can harness the perspectives, needs, and ideas of a large amount of individuals, whether they be current consumers of a product or potential users of a website. In order to innovate based on the perspectives of many people, a shift from acquiring the best idea to acquiring idea themes derived from hundreds of ideas from many users or consumers is needed. BrainReactions.net has just launched their first significant open innovation crowdsourcing effort in the form of a brainstorming competition where awards are offered not for the single best idea but for the top brainstormers. In the first few days of the competition there are 500 ideas from 60 different brainstormers. This competition is open for just under two weeks and closes on July 3rd, 2008. This specific competition offers an emerging case of crowdsourcing for the brainstorming purpose of generating multiple new ideas on the launch of a web application, including both marketing and feature development.

This case offers an opportunity to learn about the process of crowdsourcing for brainstorming. This competition has already generated different outcomes than a traditional closed room in person brainstorming session offers or what a contest where “the best idea wins” offers. First, who is brainstorming? Notably there are more brainstormers than in your typical closed room session and they come with and a more global perspective. For this competition, brainstormers come from throughout the globe with heavy representation from the U.S. and the UK. Since most web applications have a global audience and seek the perspectives, needs, and ideas of a wide range of users, crowdsourcing through brainstorming offers unique advantages. Also, new web applications want an opportunity to generate buzz. The brainstorming competition allows this through the marketing of the idea contest while a closed room in-person brainstorm does not because it is more private in nature. The crowdsourcing offers residual benefits, not just the ideas gathered and the ability to validate the direction and decisions through the voice of the user but the marketing of the competition helps to build awareness and launch the web application.

Important consideration is given to what happens before and after the competition. Most of the time spent with preparing the competition actually involves framing the challenge, creating background information (in this instance a free web based video), and identifying questions for brainstormers to generate ideas on. This takes much thought amongst organizers and the client as well as multiple iterations to finalize the questions and background. Alerting the network of brainstormers to begin was the easiest part as BrainReactions has a large network of creative brainstormers who can be readily notified with an email. It also important to consider what the final product of the competition could look like. BrainReactions brainstorming has slightly different desired outcomes then other contests which seek to generate a best idea. Rather than a single best idea, the goal of the competition is to generate hundreds of ideas from many brainstormers so that ideas could be synthesized and analyzed. The themes that emerge amongst many ideas from multiple brainstormers are often times more valuable than a “best idea” and often marketing and product development directions move forward from these themes. After the competition a team of judges with different expertise bases will also spend time at the end to select the top brainstormers based on the quantity of good ideas they provide. Since a goal of brainstorming is to gather a large number of good ideas to synthesize and generate themes around, going beyond just selecting the best idea is needed. This is a current and emerging example of crowdsourcing meeting brainstorming on the web.

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Contributed By Dan Neely, founder and CEO of Networked Insights

There has been a lot of recent talk about “Engagement”. Engagement is the new metric for social media, the measure of success for social media marketing. Although clearly defining engagement has been a challenge and people have disagreed on setting standards, it is certainly a concept worth exploring.

As soon as social media started to change the way people communicate and share interests, values or concerns, it became a gold mine of customer intelligence and insight. The key to unlocking this intelligence is to understand engagement.

What is engagement? Engagement is a combination of how people interact with each other and content (viewing, posting, inviting, rating, etc.) and what causes people to change or define their behavior (how influential people or content are).

Engagement not only shows where people are spending their time, and what topics they are discussing and with whom, but also shows the degree and depth of customer-to-customer interactions. If ad placement is based on engagement, advertisers know that the advertising is more relevant to the people that see it because it is based on the topics and people that they engage with.

For advertisers and marketers, knowing facts about their audience before spending money on social media is a huge benefit. For example, if Nike notices that a large number of users on MySpace are engaging around a particular shoe model and that very few people are doing so on Facebook, it would make a lot more sense to spend more heavily on MySpace and know exactly where to place and direct that spend. This tactic uses engagement to ensure results, not just to measure them.

Marketers all acknowledge the importance of engagement. While the subjective aspects of the metric have yet to be defined, the factual elements taken from customer engagement provide the real value. Using engagement as a way to guide and predict your ad buy or marketing spend is a clear and simple method that leverages the customer intelligence that can be gained from engagement metrics. This intelligence can also help accurately inform the content and message of the resulting marketing collateral to ensure it resonates with the target audience.

Engagement is here to stay. Just like any new metric, it will take some time to take-hold and become fully standardized, but it is undeniably a multifaceted and powerful metric that can provide value to marketers throughout the marketing process – especially before it even starts.

About the Author:

Daniel Neely
Dan is the founder and CEO of Networked Insights, the leader in customer intelligence across social media. His 10 plus years of entrepreneurial, management and operational experience with technology companies, has given him the expertise in customer intelligence and experience with the challenges companies face in gathering relevant, real-time insights about their customers.
Before starting Networked Insights, Dan co-founded Market Performance Partners, which guided companies in market ownership through customer intelligence. Prior to that, he was the director of strategy at Scient, one of the fastest growing services company in history. Before Scient, Dan was part of the team that launched eSurance, the leading online insurance company.

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Contributed By Anand Chhatpar, CEO of BrainReactions LLC

Most corporate managers, at least twice every year, will fall victim to knowledge calamities. Let me share some scenarios:

Has this ever happened to you? You are working on a project for the last 13 months and are 5 months away from your 18-month deadline, and suddenly, there’s a “corporate restructuring” event that completely dismantles your team. You find yourself leading a brand new team, one that will never achieve the performance or efficiency of the old team because 90% of your team’s knowledge has gone away with your ex-team members. This is a classic knowledge calamity. It can also happen to you a lot if you experience employee attrition or M&As.

I’m sure you have experienced this scenario if you work for a company with more than 100 employees. You realize 3 months after paying an expensive consultant that the answers you were looking for were already known to this one guy, Bob, who sits at the other end of the floor from you in a different team and never really talks to anyone from your team. That’s another knowledge calamity: “information silos”.

Here’s a new one: Your team is relying too much on advice they find on online forums to run your business. This advice is less than accurate, does not specifically apply to your business, or is simply outdated. However, your employees don’t bother asking around the company to look for the internal expert on the subject because it takes too long compared to searching for an answer on the almighty Google. I have not found a suitable name for this type of knowledge calamity. Perhaps we could call it “Our employees listen to Wikipedia more than our Senior-VP.”

Yet another knowledge calamity is the result of overused group emailing that starts with the benign intention of tapping into collective brainpower. However, 15 emails later… who does not hate mass-group-reply-all emails? Enough said.

If you can identify with any of the knowledge calamity scenarios above, let me assure you that not all hope is lost. We have licensed a brilliant solution from FPS Consulting’s Jaki Scarcello and transformed it into an easy-to-use software tool. Knowledge sharing tool Snap Answers insures your company against knowledge calamities, and is worth your time to review. There is also a tour to show you how it works. Plus, all readers of BrainWaves get a complimentary 30-day trial account for their company if they request a demo of Snap Answers and mention BrainWaves.

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

The increasing emphasis on the need to innovate is leading organizations and individuals to collect more ideas to start down the innovation pipeline. The increase of brainstorming sessions, idea submissions, and contests to fuel ideas for innovation are leaving individuals with significant lists of ideas. Many ask us where to start and what to do next with their idea lists. This calls for a story and a metaphor.

When I was in elementary school my class took a trip to small state park in Minnesota, Forestville. When one goes to Forestville it is natural to go into a forest, so that is what this group of 30 youngsters did. I remember the park ranger telling the kids that he would give a quarter to the first one that could find a grey ball in the forest. This was unusual to us, we had never heard of such a thing. But, we were up for the challenge and a quarter was a quarter and they had hard stick candy for only 10 cents at the old Forestville country store. As luck would have it I was the first to find this grey ball. I gave it to the ranger and he gave me the quarter. He then told us something amazing. He held up the grey ball in the woods and told us that it was once a mouse. I quickly looked at my hand and was grossed out. He then said that an owl will catch a mouse and eat the whole thing. The owl will digest all of the parts of the mouse that it needs and spit out what it doesn’t need in this grey ball of fur and bones called an owl pellet. Fascinating.

I traveled to San Diego in September for a conference for innovation professionals from a wide variety of corporations. One thing that was interesting to me was that these professionals and their organizations had large amounts of ideas, could get many ideas, but what was needed was a way to quickly screen these ideas. During my presentation I told the story of the owl and I suggest doing what the owl does to the mouse. Why not quickly take all of the ideas in, and then quickly only keep and devote energy to digesting those ideas that you need, are beneficial to you, and belong in you. These are the ideas that match your criteria and are for the reason why you gathered ideas in the first place. Everything else can be spat back out in a grey ball of fur and bones.

In my world of idea generating more is better. More ideas are better than less ideas. The nice thing about ideas is that they are short and can be quickly read and judged. I regularly review, analyze, and synthesize lists of over 700 ideas and make quick decisions on them. The first stage is an important one, your quick review and selection of ideas. Many ideas just get read over because they already exist, are way too far out, or are not aligned with what the organization is about. But there are a fair amount of ideas that get digested and developed from this long list. This is valuable. The key is to not get intimidated by so many ideas and to be process focused. Process focused means understanding that generating a lot of ideas is key to discovering something new or creating something innovative. So, consolidate all those ideas and start spitting out some grey balls. It is also quite good to have at least a couple of owls analyzing ideas. What you digest may be different than what someone else digests, and you may be spitting out something that is healthy.

When we work on our idea generation projects we have at least 2 formal owl analysts who digest everything and spit accordingly back into the idea list or bank them for future consideration. So, also important is to store all of the waste, those ideas that didn’t make the cut. You never know when they could come in handy later. So, begin the work of an owl with digesting your idea list!

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