Summary: Breakthrough thinking from inside the box.

Imagine attending a meeting at which and your colleagues have to invent an idea for a new business. The only instruction youre given is to think outside the box. The task is so vague that people give up without really trying.

Coyne, Clifford, and Dye suggest a better approach: semi structured brainstorming. In this process, they didnt ask to think inside outside the box. Nor did they ask to think more intently inside the box. They gave a new box and asked to think inside that. Setting the right constraints is a matter of asking the right kinds of questions: ones that create boxes that are useful, but different, from the boxes the people currently think in. For example: What businesses could we invent if we reproduced something children love in an extreme for adults?. This notion has catalyzed creation of 25+ new product categories, including SpiderMan movies and paintball. Before every meeting, take the time to clarify what constitutes the criteria for, and boundaries of, a good idea in a particular case. Do you want big ideas or safe, surefire winners? How much money can the company afford to spend? What level of staffing is the company willing to commit? But posing the right questions is only half of the work. How you organize and conduct brainstorming sessions also matters enormously. You must redesign your ideation processes so that they remove obstacles that interfere with the flow of ideas in order to help people work effectively together: for example, sequestering all the pushy people in one group so they cant dominate the others. Brainstorming should be multifaceted process, not a single event. For example: Whats more, the legitimate answer to some questions is I dont know, but we could find out if this workshop werent ending at 5:00. And sometimes ideas keep improving over time. Also important is to narrow the list of ideas to the ones that will seriously investigate right away. Dont push off the task of sorting the ideas to later. Do it right then and there. When introduce the think-inside-the-box approach in the organization, keeping in mind one other basic law of human dynamics: people are nervous about change. They may come mentally unprepared to participate the first time and may not have done their homework. After all, the never had to be on their toes before in quite this way. However, most, if not all, of them eventually will see and appreciate the change.
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Assumptions of the author

Kevin P. Coyne is senior teaching professor at the Goizueta Business School of Emory University and a co-founder of The Coyne Partnership, a boutique consulting firm focused on top management and board issues. He was formerly a senior partner at McKinsey & Co. Ten years ago, the McKinsey team learned of a study by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, then a psychology professor at the University of Chicago. In its descriptions of how Nobel prize winners and other creative people achieved their breakthroughs: Once they asked themselves the right question, their ideas fl owed rapidly. This disclosure prompted us to examine how the most successful companies in recent history had achieved their positions. We are looking at two groups: The first were already large companies that became industry shaping enterprises in a relatively short time. The second grew from garage-based start-ups into firms with more than $1 billion in (profitable) sales in less than six years. In every case, their successes were built on breakthrough ideas that redefined the products and services in their markets. The idea of thinking in a new box, with asking the right questions is according to the authors a new way of brainstorming and together with the right members of the brainstorm team, there can flow new breakthrough ideas, which can lead the company to a successful and profitable existence.

Quality of argumentation
The idea of thinking in a new box sounds easy. A framework and the right questions asked could be a more effective way for the brainstorm team to come up with new ideas. But how do we measure these new ideas? Are they successful? Can they be profitable for the company? Do they implement the new ideas of the team? At the first glance, this method could be a new strategy for creating new ideas, but I would like to know more about it. Companies who implement this idea recently, were they successful? Nowadays to come up with new ideas is really difficult since a lot of markets are satisfied. Only by asking the right questions, in my opinion, is not the only key to success and profitability.

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Methodology
y Know your organizations decision-making criteria Managers should start by understanding the real criteria the company will use to make decisions about the resulting ideas. Are there any absolute restrictions or limitations, for example? y Ask the right questions The best way is to use questions as the platform for idea generation. y Choose the right people Pick people who can answer the questions that are asked. y Divide and conquer To ensure fruitful discussions, dont have your participants hold one continuous, rambling discussions among the entire group for several hours. Instead, have them conduct multiple, discrete, highly focused idea generation sessions among subgroups of three to five people. y Framework After the participants arrive, but before the division into subgroups, orient them so that your expectations about what they will and wont accomplish is clear. y Write the best ideas down During the brainstorm meeting, write all the possible and good ideas down, in order to motivate the people.

Conclusion of the article

Traditional brainstorming is fast, furious and ultimately shallow. By scrapping these traditional techniques for a more focused, question based approach, senior managers can consistently coax better ideas from their teams.

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Overall view
The article was very interesting and gave me a glimpse of how to handle with brainstorm meetings and the framework that people can use to create new ideas. After all, thats the moment when a company can get profit out of it. Investing a lot in these meetings is a chance for every company. I preferred to see more examples and implementations of this new method, if this is really that successful. They mentioned a research about ten years ago, but I would rather see a recently implementation of this method, in order to know how successful the company is. Also some comments from employees would be a way to see how effective the implementation is.

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