What is Creative Idea Generation?
Essentially, creative idea generation involves working with a group of people to produce a large number of ideas in a short time by:
- Using things/ideas which already exist
- Relating things/ideas which were previously unrelated
- Breaking free of existing thought patterns
Many people today are familiar with the notions of ‘left-brain’ and ‘right-brain’ thinking. The brain-dominance theory was put forward by Nobel Prize winner Roger Sperry, who initiated the study of the relationship between the brain’s right and left hemispheres. Very simply, his findings suggested that the left half of the brain is responsible for analytical, rational, logical thinking, while the right hemisphere is responsible for our more intuitive, insightful, creative thinking. Most of us, it seems, are either right or left brain dominant. Within a creative idea generation workshop we aim to move participants constantly from right to left to right-brain thinking, by introducing different techniques which ‘force’ the brain to ‘think differently’. These include ‘classic’ techniques (such as brainstorming); ‘provocative’ techniques (using a random issue to prompt a new approach); and ‘analytical’ techniques (including checklists and matrices).
