Excerpt

Why Ideas Unlimited?

Chapter 1 and 2 extracts from Dr. Bob & Sue Krone,

This short book tells the story of the most effective idea generating tool now in existence. It has eighty-two years of global validation. And it instructs you in how to benefit your work, life, and your organization, through its use. The fundamental principle of Ideas Unlimited is that those who do the work possess the know-how and the insight to improve it. They are leaderships best innovation resource. But they need a method, motivation and facilitation to allow the capture of their ideas in a non-threatening environment.

There are four major Sources of ideas:

1. Libraries, the traditional source of ideas previously documented.
2. Learning from observation.
3. Capturing unrecorded ideas people have in their minds.
4. The Internet, the worlds new gold mine for documented ideas.

This book focuses primarily on Source #3 and will guide you to capture brainpower in your world. A summary of the major benefits and advantages follows.

Ideas Unlimited collects and organizes ideas from people to solve strategy, policy, planning, program, process, task, or procedural problems. It achieves this through participants providing responses to target statements or questions. Responses can be made manually in writing or electronically via e-mail or web sites. When a focus group is providing the responses the result is the aggregation of the know-how, the ideas, the problems, fixes, improvements, and recommendations of that group. Those responses are normally obtained simultaneously, independently, anonymously, and rapidly. And they are documented in the written form and content originated by the responder. That valuable feature is one of many that distinguishes Ideas Unlimited. It is an entire idea system for leaders and managers..

A Systems Approach. Each person in your focus group has something to contribute from their own unique experience. Idea Unlimited comes as close as you can get to a systems approach to the available know-how of people providing responses. All of us need to feel important and to feel we are contributing to our jobs and to feel our views are valued. The method gives everyone a chance to do so anonymously, free of the fear of any retribution or criticism for their views. Quality of inputs is high because people want to get their honest feelings to decision makers. Quantity of inputs is unmatched by other group idea generation methods because your respondent population will average one idea per minute for ten minutes of response. Every participant writes responses to a target that focuses the mind on his/her experience for the selected subject. Politics and personalities are separated from anonymously submitted ideas which can then be more objectively considered on their merits. The total data captured forms a mosaic of specific know-how and improvement recommendations from those who do the work.

Economic Feasibility. Ideas Unlimited has been employed throughout a huge range of applications. None of those applications involved large costs to prepare or to conduct. Time conservation for people in your focus group is an important bonus advantage.

Democratic. Equal opportunity to contribute is another benefit. Ideas Unlimited is completely democratic. In the manual method you will have no aggressive members dominating the discussion nor timid ones afraid to speak out in front of the group, which are normal occurrences in Brainstorming. The method opens the way for each individual to express themselves confidentially in their own words, flowing from their unique experiences, education and life work and for you to capture those words in a permanent database.

Fixes Problems with Multi-Purpose Data . Every Ideas Unlimited application is specialized to solve a problem. The aggregated data obtained includes a huge inventory of performance improvement strategies,, tactics and ideas

Invents New Ideas. The method has the ability to bring to the surface ideas that the respondent has in his or her memory bank but which have become part of Tacit Knowledge which cannot be readily recalled. It can also produce new ideas that were not already there through the neurological process of Associative Memory --where the sequential writing of ideas to an Ideas Unlimited target produces a series of ideas each one growing from the preceding one.

No limits to group sizes or circumstances. The minimum size for an Ideas Unlimited work session is one. The method is a personal productivity tool as well as a group survey method. Although we have used the method for hundreds of people in short conference applications, we advise that the optimum focus group size for more in-depth analysis is about twenty participants. If you do not use Ideas Unlimited, you will never know how many good ideas are stored in the minds of men, women and children.

Performance and Productivity. Productivity analysis creates improvement. You need to positively spot the troubles, then find remedies. You look for deficiencies, imperfections, sources of error and needs. A critically important characteristic of Ideas Unlimited is that it aims to solicit directive improvement ideas, not descriptions or attitudes. Think of all the surveys you have used or been asked to complete. Many of them ask for attitudes. Decision makers cannot rely only on likes and dislikes (i.e. attitudes) to make strategic, tactical, policy, personnel, quality or process decisions. They need specific improvement ideas that can be validated by performance improvement over time.

Organizational Diagnosis. Humans thinking creatively for the benefit of themselves and others is essential for progress and for survival. An unevaluated system will lose energy and deteriorate. Unknowns cannot be fixed. Diagnosis to terminate non-value added portions of the system should be periodic. And change increase periods are continually shortening the time needed for diagnosis. Knowing what is wrong is essential. Knowing how to fix it is critically important and often harder to determine. Ideas Unlimited will be a tool to help you individually, and the organizations you lead or work for, to meet all of those needs. It is a treasure for global decision makers.

As the third millennium commences it is evident that there will be no end to the value of Ideas Unlimited.