Building Better Ideas

5 ▪ Expressing Ideas

Most researchers and experts in innovation agree that having a greater number of ideas to choose from makes it more likely that you will end up with a higher-quality and more-innovative solution. As noted earlier, many such experts also suggest that diverse groups generate much more creative ideas. Diversity may be in age, gender, professional background, status, experience, ethnicity, and so on— all can contribute to a richer ideation session. (Teams with fluid boundaries might benefit from including “ad hoc” members for specific debates so they can gain the diversity they otherwise lack.) The skills we will explore in this chapter, shown in Figure 2, are designed to help individuals get a hearing, especially for new and ...