Alex Osborn (1888-1966) was founding partner of one of the most highly regarded advertising agencies, BBDO, and is credited with introducing the brainstorming process in his book, Applied Imagination: Principles and Procedures of Creative Problem-Solving, published in 1957. His process has three stages: fact-finding, idea generating, and solution evaluating. He recommended four “rules”:

o Generate as many ideas as possible
o Defer judgment on all ideas
o Generate wild ideas
o Build upon each other’s ideas

Years later, in Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation (2012) and then in Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity (2013), Keith Sawyer stands atop Osborn’s broad “shoulders” when suggesting an eight-stage creative process that does replace brainstorming. When conducted properly, he suggests, brainstorming can be essential to the success of stage five:

1. Identify and define the problem
2. Gather relevant information
3. Gather potentially related information
4. Allow time for incubation
5. Generate a large variety of ideas
6. Combine ideas in unexpected ways
7. Select the best ideas
8. Externalize [i.e. prototype] and continue to improve the idea

Sawyer strongly emphasizes that all eight stages should be valued and integrated within the process. In fact, “I think of them primarily as practices of disciplines, not even really as stages. They alternate. You go through all of them. You y=use them at different times of the day. And they tend to roughly fall in a chronological sequence, but a lot of times they don’t.”

In recent years, Sawyer and other authorities agree that the creative process is most productive when it is collaborative and, contrary to Osborn’s view, that each proposed idea be subjected to rigorous, indeed intensive scrutiny. In my opinion, one of the most important developments is the shift at IDEO to design thinking, a method that involves extensive research (product, market, and client as well as its customers and competition) before attempting to generate ideas, based on research and ethnographic studies. Prototypes enable those involved to visual not only the given product but also its various design features. IDEO’s Tom Kelley observes, “No idea is so good that it can’t be improved upon, and we plan on a [begin italics] series [end italics] of improvements.”

I agree with Sawyer: “If you try to have ideas without doing all the other stuff, it’s not going to happen. It’s like waiting for corn to grow without planting any seeds.”