Introduction

Properly organized and run, a group can be a gold-mine of ideas.

—Alex Osborn

Alex Osborn loved ideas. His ideas helped to propel his advertising agency, BBDO, to become one of the most innovative advertising firms in the United States. In 1948, he revealed the secret to a process for coming up with new ideas and innovations in his book, Your Creative Power: How to Use Your Imagination.1

One of the chapters, “How to Organize a Squad to Create Ideas,” introduced a process for soliciting many ideas from groups of people. Osborn called the process brainstorming. He described how BBDO used the process to generate more and better ideas. These ideas were at the heart of the advertising agencies’ success. Many decades later, brainstorming is as popular as ever. Need new marketing ideas? Engineering problem not solved? Wondering how to win that new deal? No matter the industry or domain, you have likely participated in brainstorming sessions.

Since its introduction, the brainstorming process has been the subject of various studies and critiques, and the process has evolved. For example, Osborn believed that people should delay feedback—people were encouraged to accept all ideas. However, research suggests that debating ideas can yield better quality ideas. Similarly, while Osborn focused on everyone generating ideas together, research suggests that we are better off producing ideas independently, before getting together.2

While Osborn made brainstorming famous, he also introduced another idea that was much less practical at the time. Following his discussion of brainstorming, he talked about idea-thinking on a larger scale. He described processes that were enabling organizations to accept ideas from all of their employees. Building on the highly acclaimed suggestion systems developed at US production plants during World War II, Osborn showed how his firm was taking brainstorming to the next level. He showed how hundreds of his employees were using suggestion systems to get the best ideas from anywhere in his firm.

Half a century after Osborn introduced us to brainstorming, the Internet transformed our ability to gather ideas on a large scale. First, e-mail replaced the paper and wooden suggestions boxes. And now, applications are speeding the collection and evaluation of ideas on a scale that lets us take Osborn’s ideas to a new level. Organizations in countless industries have successfully turned to very large groups for their ideas. These online crowds might work within large organizations, but more often participants are not employees. To date, these crowds have worked together to design new products, improve services, create new marketing campaigns, and bring to market low-carbon-footprint housing—to name just a few of the many areas. This is brainstorming on a much larger scale.

We call this crowdstorming.

Like brainstorming before it, crowdstorming requires that we understand how best to organize the process for gathering and evaluating ideas. There are many parts of the process under investigation. This book is intended to explore and highlight the best ways we know to make crowdstorms work. Our approach builds on our combined experience with more than 200 projects and working with over 100,000 individual participants from around the globe in domains spanning marketing, strategy, design, engineering, and architecture. We have also studied hundreds of projects from other domains and talked with some of their organizers. And we have consulted a rapidly growing body of research across a wide array of disciplines—from social science to human computer interaction—that cover the many different dimensions of crowdstorm processes.

We have seen the many ways that organizations can innovate by working with external talent:

• Fortune 500 companies that are reinventing their product lines or bringing new offerings to market can benefit from the steps we outline.
• Small and mid-size companies can use crowdstorming processes to greatly increase their access to global talent in a number of domains.
• Nonprofits and governmental agencies can leverage the processes and tools we discuss to tackle broad social change initiatives and create awareness around these issues.
• Professional organizations, such as consultancies and advertising agencies, can benefit from many of the ideas to enhance their current capabilities—and connect their global talent pools in more effective ways.
• Universities looking to create new virtual studio environments can also apply the material in the book—recapturing the studio environment in an online world where individuals regularly share and review work.

To highlight the potential value of the processes, we have included examples spanning industries and business functions, from startups creating consumer products to a Fortune 500 company’s global energy business.

How to Read This Book

For the reader who is beginning to explore the potential of working with talent outside his or her organization, we recommend reading Chapter 1: First, Some Context. We offer an overview of what organizations are doing with outside talent—from crowdsourcing to collaborative consumption. We focus on the benefits of outside talent, crowds, and communities and we explain where crowdstorming fits in a quickly expanding universe of crowd-enabled business processes.

For those who have worked with crowdsourcing, open innovation, cocreation, or mass collaboration, the benefits are likely already familiar. For you, we’ve broken the crowdstorming lifecycle down to highlight the best approaches to planning, organizing, and executing crowdstorming projects.

Figure I.1 shows how a crowdstorm project might be organized from planning and organizing through execution and review (or meta). There is one notable exception. We have moved the discussion about online spaces (which covers the role of technologies and platforms) to the end. We think it’s important to understand everything that makes crowdstorming work, before considering the right enabling technologies. Broadly, the chapters try to answer the following questions:

Figure I.1 The Crowdstorming Lifecycle

• How to weigh the business benefit of crowdstorming with an organization’s legal, confidentiality, and brand needs
• What kinds of questions to ask crowdstorm participants
• How to compel a community to participate and reward them when they do
• How to recruit the best people to join your crowdstorm
• How a coalition of partners can enhance crowdstorming
• How to organize participants for the best results
• How to monitor a community in support of community management
• How to evaluate results
• The technology alternatives to enable crowdstorming
• Moving beyond what we have shared in this book

We love the possibilities of crowdstorming, but we are much more excited about ensuring that you can get results from the process. So each chapter includes references to academic research and interviews, as well as our own observations. And the concepts are made tangible with stories in each chapter.

Let’s Begin

We cannot promise that we have cracked the code on all the ways organizations will use crowdstorming. What we can help you recognize— and utilize—are clear, actionable steps to begin realizing innovative outcomes by leveraging external talent. Exploring the art of the possible with a structure to harness this power can help you with idea creation, innovation, and problem solving.

We love ideas. But we love putting ideas into action even more. So let’s get started.

Notes

1. Alex Osborn, Your Creative Power: How to Use Your Imagination (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948).

2. For an introductory summary of research on brainstorming see Jonah Lehrer, “Groupthink: the Brainstorming Myth,” The New Yorker, January 30, 2012, www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lehrer#ixzz28IJhxJEf.