What Is Collaborative Brainstorming?

The history of brainstorming

Alex Osborn, a top advertising executive in the 1950s, created the concept of brainstorming to encourage creativity and idea generation among his employees. He wrote extensively about brainstorming and other complementary techniques in his book, "Applied Imagination: Principles and Procedures of Creative Thinking." 

Osborn's brainstorming rules were simple: Welcome wild ideas. Come up with as many as possible. Withhold criticism. Combine and improve the best ideas. 

These rules are intended to reduce social inhibitions when brainstorming in groups and create a psychologically safe and encouraging environment to generate new ideas.

Collaborative brainstorming tools

The best brainstorming sessions are accompanied by simple and accessible software that allows participants to record, visualize, and share the progress of ideas. They help document ideas and action steps and create a clear trail to see how ideas flow and develop.

Enhance your team's creative power with online collaborative brainstorming tools to make it easy for team members to brainstorm, visualize, and develop ideas together, regardless of location. These tools include digital whiteboards, mind-mapping tools, video-conferencing software, file-sharing platforms, and many others.

Tips to improve collaborative brainstorming

Use the tips below to improve collaborative exercises with your teams:

• Let people work alone first: When people collaborate, their ideas converge, causing them to think similarly about the subject. However, when people work alone, everyone takes a slightly different path in thinking about the problem, and ideas diverge. To get the best out of your collaborative brainstorming sessions, let people work alone first before coming together as a team to build on the initially generated ideas. 
• Elevate shy voices: Brainstorming sessions often put shy participants at a disadvantage. Appoint a facilitator to lead your brainstorming sessions, moderate the group, and ensure everyone's ideas are heard and considered. 
• Give enough time: Allow enough time for the participants to relax, understand the subject or problem, and begin generating ideas. Groups should have time to ponder and explore many ideas rather than only focusing on the first few possibilities they come up with. 
• Stay focused on the subject: Brainstorming facilitators should keep discussions on topic and bring the conversation back to the main talking points any time the group diverges. 

Wrike’s actionable meeting notes template enables you to track ideas during the brainstorming meeting, assign action items, and organize your thoughts for future reference. See how Wrike can facilitate seamless collaboration with a two-week free trial.