Collaborative Ideation Tools

Anonymous Voting
Aimed at overcoming the main disadvantage of Brainstorming (the same applies to focus groups, btw): peer-pressure, peer-predominance, shyness and/or feelings of inferiority, inadequacy.
When plenary voting for preferred ideas, members may not express their true believes, which is avoided by asking to rank them on a balloting paper and by creating sufficient space for participants to feel free of third party scrutiny.

Bodystorming
A type of projective identification, sometimes used in collaborative ideation for product design, where the designer “embodies” – imagines to be – the final product. See also: Observer and Merged Viewpoints.

BrainSketching
VanGundy, Techniques of Structured Problem Solving (1988). Group work tool in which a group of people – seated in a circle – draw a number of sketches on how the given problem could be solved, passing them on to the person on their right when finished. The passed-on sketches are then either further developed, or used as a stimulus for new sketches. At the end of the exercise, the sketches are collected, explained if necessary, categorized and evaluated, after which the best, or most appropriate for solving the given problem are selected.

Brainstorming
Osborn, Applied Imagination (1967). Currently, the best-known and most widely used collaborative problem solving method, which has engendered a large offspring of similar group work tools. Its fundamental concept is postponing judgement during the process of ideation.

Tools & Techniques for Ideation

Introduction to Ideation
Before briefly describing creative thinking tools or techniques, there are three points which need attention.

One: the old adage that two know more than one is most certainly true for creative thinking.
It is no coincidence that the advertising industry introduced the concept of so-called Creative Teams (Art Director and Copywriter) in the early 1960’s, that tools for collaborative systematic inventive thinking or group work are – after ideation – by far the largest group of related tools, nor that the most universally used and well-know model for collective ideation – Brainstorming – was created by an advertising man, BBDO co-founder Alex Osborn.

Two: Listing is extremely useful in virtually any structured, systematic thinking and/or Ideation effort. Listing synonyms, antonyms, advantages, disadvantages, alternatives, assumptions, bugs, categories, limitations, opposites, parts, relations, rules, suppositions and so forth, is practically always a good starting point for personal and collective thinking processes.
Listing is an integral part of many of the systematic creative processes or methods described here, because – as established earlier – quantity is, especially at the initial stages of the creative process, more important than quality.
Fluency – the ability to generate large amounts of ideas or alternative solutions for a problem – is also an integral part of virtually all creativity tests, for starters the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT).
In my experience Listing is the simplest, most practical and most productive precursor for creative thinking, even with totally untrained subjects or individuals with exceptionally well developed creativity inhibitors. After all: almost anybody can make a shopping list.