Mauricio Baltazar
Jan 25, 22 | 8 min read
brainwriting
Reading time: 6 minutes
If you work in marketing , you've probably already done brainstorming in your career or at least heard about it, right? A very useful practice to generate ideas, especially in advertising , whether to innovate and create a market offer or to solve such a problem.
However, brainstorming has some flaws , and list of turkey consumer email in some contexts, other practices can be much more effective. That's where brainwriting comes in!
We can consider it a variation of its better-known partner and its main benefits are linked to the experience of the participants and also to the quality of the final ideas.
If you're looking to improve your company's idea generation methods, then you need to know more about brainwriting . In this article, you'll learn:
What is brainwriting?
What are the differences between brainwriting and brainstorming?
How to do brainwriting?
What are the benefits of brainwriting?
Read on to discover how to generate more creativity!
What is brainwriting?
Ideas are essential to continue innovating, to create products and services, to optimize the way of working and, thus, to achieve better results. More than that, they are vital to obtain and maintain a good competitive advantage .
As companies that have a vision for the future and embrace innovation move forward, processes have emerged to help the flow of ideas that need to be integrated into work activities.
To do this, we use brainwriting, a technique that involves a group in generating ideas in writing and sharing them , transmitting them to the rest of the participants, who launch new ideas and build on those already launched.
It is important to note that all this happens silently, in a combination of individual and group interactions, to be finally discussed by the entire team.
The person responsible for its creation was the German Bernd Rohrbach, who published his process in 1968 in the journal Absatzwirtschaft. The technique was named by its inventor as 6-3-5 Brainwriting and each number represents a criterion:
6 people and 6 rounds of ideas;
3 ideas per person in each round;
5 minutes is the time for each round.
Under the supervision of a moderator, each of the 6 participants starts by writing 3 ideas on a piece of paper within 5 minutes. After that, you pass it to the colleague on the left and the time limit starts counting again to write 3 more ideas based on the ones you just received.
The rounds continue, and by the time the paper is returned to the person who started it, the group will have generated at least 108 ideas in just half an hour . Amazing, isn't it?
Quantity isn't the only benefit, far from it! But before we tell you about the other benefits of brainwriting, let's explain how this process differs from brainstorming. Read on below!
What are the differences between brainwriting and brainstorming?
Just as we presented the origin of brainwriting, we will also present how brainstorming was born and consolidated!
The brainstorming method was created by American Alex F. Osborn, a newspaper salesman turned publicist. In his career, he proved himself a master of creativity, exploring how creative works were made and how they could be made better.
In this process, he outlined some crucial points for the development of brainstorming, such as:
don't criticize until creativity starts flowing;
Quantity is more important than quality in idea generation;
think outside the box;
Ideas must be combined and optimized until the best one is found.
Do you recognize them all? They are all pillars of brainstorming and were fundamental in consolidating the importance of an idea generation process in organizations when they needed new solutions.
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In general, the sessions became a meeting of participants who must give free rein to their creativity on a topic in an oral discussion and, together, debate ideas for a final selection, with everything recorded on a whiteboard.
