Turnaround of ideas

Idea generation, the initial phase of ideation (the generation, development and communication of ideas) is quick, typified by the brainstorming technique. In the creative industry, such as advertising and marketing, however, ideation services can be slow, i.e. there can be a considerable gap between the client's brief and the agency's presentation of new ideas. To speed things up, one such media agency, Mindshare, is challenging traditional communications planning and has launched a service that produces a campaign within 24 hours of a brief being submitted by clients, who will only pay if they like the idea. Although such quick turnarounds of clients' briefs seem to fit today's fast-paced media world, there are concerns that the concept might encourage short-term tactical thinking over long-term strategic thinking necessary for brand-building. Such reservations, moreover, reflect how unconstrained brainstorming sessions rarely produce meaningful results. Arguably idea generation sessions work best when designed, rather than improvised. That is, attention is paid to what should be done before the actual session ("framing the question") as well as after the session ("follow-up").

Innovation is opaque

History is opaque. And so too, it may be argued, is innovation. Or, to paraphrase Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: Innovation is what comes out in the market, the application of better solutions to products or services, not the thinking that produces a new idea, device or method, the generator of ideas. Thus there is an incompleteness of our grasp of the action or process of innovating, since we don't fullly understand how innovation works, in a world that is more complex, complicated or random than we realise. Or, as explained by Tim Berners-Lee, the WorldWideWeb inventor, innovation occurs when a lot of random ideas mix until they fit.