From Brainstorm to Breakthrough: The 7 Qualities of Idea Capture Tools to Consider
Ideation is an inherently creative act—generating new, unique and relevant possibilities that your customers will love requires thinking differently, expanding your perspectives, and letting creative ideas flow freely. But many times, the way we capture ideas gets in the way. From maintaining creative energy to the effort required to prioritize the ideas generated, participants of an ideation session are required to move through and navigate the tools of idea capture—and those tools can have huge implications for the quality of output from the session. If you want to maximize the potential of the participants and their expertise, that idea capture tool should be simple to use and actually facilitate creative thinking.
It wasn’t long ago that most organizations ran their brainstorms using pen, paper and post-it notes. In fact, many still do. But when 2020 accelerated the shift to the digital world, a lot of new online idea capture and collaboration tools popped up, leading to a new tool for hosting brainstorms. And now that there are so many idea capture tools in existence, it can feel like a hazy world to navigate—what do these tools do well, what do they do differently, and what are (if any) the downfalls of such tools?
Similar to the notion of “the medium is the message” that Marshall McLuhan popularized in his 1964 work Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, I believe that the medium or tool in which we capture our new and innovative ideas plays a large role in organizational innovation. To oversimplify McLuhan’s message, he argued that different tools, such as print or television, have distinct qualities and properties that shape our perception and cognition, either through their actual communications or the ways users engage with the tool. For example, the way people communicate and consume content on Twitter is not the same as they would while reading or writing a book. Similarly, the way we capture ideas during a brainstorm impacts the actual creativity and effectiveness of the session itself, from the formation and synthesis of ideas to the prioritization of the final output. The tool here affects not only the message, but also the way we think, communicate and relate to one another.
Given this, let’s explore two things: First, the qualities of different idea capture tools based on a few properties that matter most to ideation success, and second, how the participants interacting with these tools impact the ultimate quality of your output. We have identified seven different factors that impact the intersection of the participants, tools and overall creativity within a session. We will first outline and define these factors, then take a look at the most common tools for capturing ideas in today’s world—from sticky notes to online whiteboarding tools—and give each tool a score for each factor.
Live Collaboration
The first factor we have identified is whether or not the tool supports and/or facilitates live collaboration across all participants. In basic terms, can multiple participants work together simultaneously in the same “space”? Given that organizations cultivate the top talent and minds in their fields, it would be a waste to not have a cross-functional team working together on any challenge. Diverse perspectives and live collaboration breed the cross-pollination of ideas, opening new doors to creative solutions. Each thought is inspiration for a new spark, so it is important that participants can work together on each challenge.
While Live Collaboration is important, you also don’t want to give everyone the ability to delete others’ work and ideas by accident, something for which virtual white boards are notorious. There is no moment more stressful than seeing an entire whiteboard disappear and needing to tell everyone to stop what they are doing and have each person hit Ctrl+Z until your work reappears.
Scoring Live Collaboration:
Visibility
The second factor is all about building an environment where every idea captured can be seen by every participant involved. Any idea—good or bad—can spark new thoughts for someone else, which leads to more ideas that go in different directions. We call this idea “building,” where an idea in Participant A’s mind takes on a whole new life in Participant B’s mind. Ideas become contagious and can snowball, again leading to a higher quantity of ideas.
Visibility also creates a shared energy in the ideation. Seeing 50 ideas generated in 30 minutes is a lot more inspiring than being left in the dark about the work being done. And if the Facilitator notices the pace of ideation slowing down, they can redirect participants if necessary, whether it is switching topics or adding creative sparks to the process.
It is worth noting that Visibility is related to Live Collaboration, but more in the sense that Visibility is the square, whereas Live Collaboration is the rectangle. Visibility means you have Live Collaboration, but Live Collaboration does not mean you have Visibility. For example, if you are working with post-it notes while the team is broken out into groups of 3, you are still collaborating, but don’t have visibility into the ideas the other teams are generating.
Scoring Visibility:
Anonymity
Just because ideas should be visible does not mean their authors should be publicly displayed. One of the most important environmental settings to foster creativity is the understanding that ideas are not shot down immediately for not being perfect. During brainstorms, the ideas being shared should be novel, i.e. have not been thought of or tried before. That means they also won’t be perfect, which is fine because the convergence process allows for further refinement. There are many things to do to circumvent negative environments that shoot down ideas, but a main driver is anonymity. If someone generates an idea that really pushes the boundaries, they won’t be hesitant to share it because they know they won’t be personally ridiculed for the idea. In other words, participants’ creativity won’t be hampered by the fear of sharing. Being able to remain anonymous promotes more innovative thinking.
Another reason anonymity matters is because you don’t want blanket conformity around the ideas generated by the most senior-level people in the room. That is pandering, not an ingredient for organizational success. Anonymity behind ideas levels the playing field through the tool, giving each idea an equal chance once it is entered.
Scoring Anonymity:
Speed
Our brains think faster than we can speak, and we can speak faster than we can write. And since creative sparks happen in a flash, any distraction can lead the mind down a different road and cause you to forget the genius idea that was present only moments ago. That is why the Speed of which an idea can be captured is highly valuable here. It is the job of the idea capture tool to make it easy for you to get your idea onto the ledger so that it isn’t lost.
Speed of capture also leads to an increase in the quantity of ideas, and quantity leads to quality. ITG’s favorite metaphor here is that of the wedding photographer. The photographer doesn’t attend the wedding, snap seven perfect photos and then hand that off to the happy couple. They take hundreds, if not thousands of photos, then filter through those after the fact to select the best of the best. The same is true of ideas during a brainstorm.
Scoring Speed:
Intuitiveness
A cousin of Speed is the Intuitiveness of the tool. Being intuitive facilitates the speed with which ideas are captured, but the Intuitiveness creates a snappy environment for everyone involved, not just those familiar with the tool. Every ideation brings together a diverse set of participants, all (likely) with varying knowledge of the details and inner workings of the tool being used. Onboarding participants onto new technology eats into valuable time that could otherwise be spent generating ideas and working toward collaborative solutions.
Unintuitive tools also add to the cognitive load of the unfamiliar folks. If they are spending time trying to figure out how to do this and how to do that, they aren’t focused on the organizational challenges and innovative solutions to those challenges—they are instead trying to figure out how to navigate the technology in front of them.
An illustrative example of Intuitiveness is like riding a bike while trying to solve a complicated problem. If you already know how to ride the bike, you will have no problem thinking while peddling. But if this is your first time on a bike, you will be more focused on your balance than actually thinking through solutions—all while your teammates are cruising past you on their bikes. The higher the learning curve, the less focus there will be on the actual brainstorm’s objectives.
Scoring Intuitiveness:
Idea Organization
While you don’t want to put too many restrictions on the ideas being generated in a brainstorm, providing basic guardrails and organizational structure will help when it comes to prioritization. At ITG, we organize ideas based on Opportunity Areas, which are broad, consumer-centric themes that articulate challenges to be solved or unmet consumer needs. This form of organization helps foster a diverse range of ideas within your overall innovation challenge, but also allows for a simple voting process after ideation. Looking at 400 ideas without any structure is much more overwhelming than looking at 50 ideas across 8 Opportunity Areas.
Scoring Idea Organization:
Voting
The last factor we have identified is the ability to vote on the ideas being generated. Divergence—the act of generating lots and lots of possibilities—tends to get all the focus when it comes to ideations, but convergence—the prioritization and synthesis of final output—is where success is really defined. I don’t think many organizations would consider a list of 800 ideas the ideal ideation output. Those ideas need to be evaluated based on different criteria and filtered into a high-potential list. While voting might seem primitive, it is the most effective way of visualizing where your team overall has passion. And while the ideas that get the most votes from your team doesn’t necessarily mean that is the winning idea with consumers, it is the best first step in sorting and identifying which ideas you should consider moving forward.
The actual process of voting is just step 1 here. Step 2 is tallying the votes and easily displaying the ideas the received the most excitement. Think about counting and tallying dots on 400 sticky notes on the wall, then moving the stickies around based on their vote—that takes way more time than it should. Most digital idea capture tools should be able to do this seamlessly.
Scoring Voting:
Brainstorming Tools Graded with the 7 Qualities:
With over 40 years of experience leading the world’s top brands through the innovation process, these are the properties of an idea capture tool that ITG has identified for promoting creativity and overall innovation success. At the end of the day, innovation depends on more than just the people you involve. It is the means by which you carry out that innovation process, with an emphasis on the tool for capturing ideas. If the tool promotes all the best practices available to organizational success, your ideation is more likely to have an impact. But if the tool hinders innovative thinking and adds friction to the process, you are ultimately at the mercy of the tool you choose.