Brainstorming

“The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones away.” ― Linus Pauling

Before each session of the Industrial Seminar in Future Technology course participants think  about the problem we will address during the meeting through a pre-assignment. The pre-assignment includes exploring the content matter of the session from the participants’ background and starting to reflect and ideate upon the topic. Later, when we are together in the session,  each team brainstorms and ideates together.

There are diverse techniques for brainstorming and ideation, which nowadays are often utilized across different organizations and academic settings. As this is an advanced course, it is assumed that participants already know most of brainstorming and ideation techniques, at least at general level. Consequently, we do not explain brainstorming or ideation techniques in each session, instead we let each team apply the brainstorming technique that suits them better according to the circumstances, e.g. team composition, location, topic.

However, as we gather more experience from our seminar sessions and listen to the feedback of our participants, we realize the importance of having a repository where participants can gain more information from different brainstorming and ideation techniques. As the course is organic, meaning we work with different companies and participants with different backgrounds and experiences, we need to have a location where we include suggestions and advice that are useful for anyone and that can be growing as we learn together.

For the participants of each session, we can discuss together and expand our knowledge on brainstorming and ideation while we apply these techniques in each real life context. The following list of resources is not an exhaustive inventory of techniques, but inspiring resources from known experts and we can start from those resources. The page will be evolving over time, and each one of us can contribute to it and suggest resources so that it can benefit all of us.

Ideally, through  the seminar sessions, participants gain more experience of applying diverse techniques across different settings. We can discuss brainstorming and ideation techniques when we are working together in each session and understanding the circumstances of each team. Remember the most important goal is to learn and gain experience on how to generate ideas together, while applying to a particular domain,  and enjoy the process while we are discovering a new context.