Breakthrough Thinking from Inside the Box

Research-Technology Management, March-April, 2008

Breakthrough Thinking from Inside the Box; Kevin P. Coyne, Patricia Gorman Clifford, and Renee Dye; Harvard Business Review, December 2007, pp. 70-78.

The secret to regularly generating good (and sometimes great) ideas is deceptively simple, claim executive counselor Kevin Coyne and two McKinsey strategy consultants. They write that many managers fail at this because they either encourage unstructured out-of-the-box thinking or its opposite: quantitative analysis of existing market and financial data and customer opinion. From workshops the authors have conducted with hundreds of managers, responsible for major product innovations to simple process improvements, they propose "a middle path between the two extremes of boundless speculation and quantitative data analysis."

Unlike traditional brainstorming, their process is structured around "21 Great Questions for Developing New Products." Derived from a reverse-engineering exercise on 50 breakthrough ideas from many industries, the process "typically generates a surfeit of constructive ideas."