When you can’t find another head Many of the great companies were started by multiple founders. The electronics company Hewlett-Packard was started in a garage in Palo Alto, California by Bill Hewlett and David Packard. The electronics company Apple was started in a garage in Los Altos, California by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The…
No such thing as a new idea? “There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations.” Mark Twain On the one hand this…
Dot voting is a great technique for reaching a decision when a team has many options for solving a problem.
Catalyze your inventive thinking with SCAMPER Ideas are the building blocks of innovation. The key to generating your best ideas is to break the process into two steps. First there is divergence – coming up with a large number of ideas. Following that is convergence – narrowing those ideas down to something workable to try. This process works…
The more the better In previous posts I’ve talked about the importance of first assembling a large number – and more importantly a large variety – of ideas, comparing it to breathing or panning for gold. The central idea is that it is impossible to pick a winner and enter contestants at the same time.…
Breathing in, breathing out I have compared the process of divergence (coming up with a large number of ideas) and convergence (narrowing those ideas down to something workable to try) to breathing. This is a useful simile because it drives home the point that you can’t breathe in and breathe out at the same time.…
That’s a good idea, but… Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. You’ve been invited to a meeting to find a solution to a problem. The boss asks for ideas. You gamely offer one, but it’s been done before, or it’s too expensive, or it won’t work, or we don’t do that here, or…
One on top of the other Solitaire is a game played with a clear objective. “The first objective is to release and play into position certain cards to build up each foundation, in sequence and in suit, from the ace through the king. The ultimate objective is to build the whole pack onto the foundations,…