A bit over a year ago, I conducted a “brainstorming” session designed to stir the creative juices amongst marketers and engineers in a fairly specialised manufacturing company. We did all the usual stuff, breakouts, whiteboards, butcher-paper, mixed in with some deliberately provocative questions and several guests who came in a gave a contrarian view of their world. All was captured electronically for reference, recall, and follow up as the initiated ideas were filtered and turned into projects.

A couple of weeks ago, we conducted a more formal follow up in another brainstorm about the value and progress of the initial effort, and it was clear that whilst it was pretty good, the “buzz” of the initial workshop had been compromised, the corporate culture of conservative engineering, personnel KPI’s and cost management had overwhelmed  the creative energy of the initial effort. We toyed with ideas about how we might address this challenge, and decided to  put a big whiteboard with fishbone diagrams of all the identified projects, along with post-it notes and pens in a walkway area between the factory floor and the offices, a point of continuous traffic by all personnel, and encourage all to add their 2 cents worth at any time.  Seemed like a pretty good idea, and the first couple of weeks have been encouraging.

Yesterday, this link to “ideapaint” was sent to me,  same idea, but it is like comparing a V-Dub to a Ferrari!