Breakthrough thinking from inside the box

Companies often begin their search for great ideas either by encouraging wild, outside-the-box thinking or by conducting quantitative analysis of existing market and financial data and customer opinions. Those approaches can produce middling ideas at best, say Coyne, founder of an executive-counseling firm in Atlanta, and Clifford and Dye, strategy experts at McKinsey. The problem with the first method is that few people are very good at unstructured, abstract brainstorming. The problems with the second are that databases are usually compiled to describe current--not future--offerings, and customers rarely can tell you whether they need or want a product if they've never seen it. The secret to getting your organization to regularly generate lots of good ideas, and occasionally some great ones, is deceptively simple: First, create new boxes for people to think within so that they don't get lost in the cosmos and they have a basis for offering ideas and knowing whether they're making progress in the brainstorming session. Second, redesign ideation processes to remove obstacles that interfere with the flow of ideas--such as most people's aversion to speaking in groups larger than ten. This article offers a tested approach that poses concrete questions. For example, what do Rollerblades, Häagen-Dazs ice cream, and Spider-Man movies have in common? The answer: Each is something that adults loved as children and that was reproduced in an expensive form for grown-ups. Asking brainstorming participants to ponder how their childhood passions could be recast as adult offerings might generate some fabulous ideas for new products or services.