Does your team rely on 'brainstorming' to come up with new ideas?

Our bias is that 'brainstorming' is a great way to build consensus and a woeful way to generate ideas.

True 'creatives' are loners, one might even say they are 'prickly'. They don't do their best work in focus groups and they are often outvoted or shouted down in an internal brainstorming session. Give them a chance to work on their own, alone, and they do what they do best: come up with great out-of-the-box ideas.

Rather than the same old brainstorming session amongst internal staff, wouldn't it be great to be able to tap into people who are naturally creative and ask them to do it for you? We believe that truly creative people are better than average consumers at coming up with great ideas. One application of the creatives is for concept development.

Using a number of proprietary questions and test derived from psychological theory, BrainJuicer has developed a creativity test to identify 'creative consumers' (around 6% of the total population), whom we maintain as an online panel for creative assignments. (We can even screen 'creatives' in your own company, who can work along with creative consumers).

We screen them, send them a brief of your best ideas and challenge them to come back with better ideas and concepts after four days time.

We then distill and assemble 52 unique ideas and 2 'Jokers' - a deck of cards ready to go into a 'Team Harvesting Workshop', which BrainJuicer moderates to ensure a seamless innovation process.

• Creative Consumers generate ideas that are truly 'Fresh & Different', as they are not held back by self limiting beliefs about what's (technically) possible, or corporate do's and don'ts (collective paradigms). Most often Creative 6ers' ideas out perform internally generated ideas at the concept screening stage.
• The process is fast, cost efficient and can be conducted with consumers across the globe or in specific markets.
• By the time the concepts are ready to be tested through quantitative screening (hopefully BrainJuicer's Predictive Markets), the internal team has bought-into the concepts, shaped and thoroughly optimized with Creative Consumer input.

• Communication ideas for an OTC medication
• Mobile phone service ideas
• New cereal products
• Insight generation for a personal care product

• Take the Creativity Test and find out how creative you are!
• Download the presentation from Innovate 2008, Amsterdam: Generating and Testing the Ideas That Will Smell Just Right. Authors: Evert Bos, BrainJuicer; Jaroslav Cir, Unilever
• Contact Us to identify 'creatives' in your company as well as to harness the power of Creative Consumers to speed and enhance idea generation in the new product development funnel

Click on the “see how we can help” button, call us or contact us here.