7 Tips to Inspire Brilliant Ideas through Effective Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a big part of any workweek in the marketing world. While you’ll always need fresh ideas, you don’t have to use the same tactics every time. If your brainstorming has gotten stale and repetitive, it’s time to seek new tricks and tools to inspire your team. Try out these seven ways to improve the effectiveness of your brainstorming sessions.

Make sure employees aren’t afraid to shout out ideas, even when they’re not always great. When you shame them for a bad idea, they’re less likely to participate. This doesn’t mean you have to give equal time and consideration to all ideas. If it’s immediately clear it’s not going to work, explain why and move on without calling it out as a bad idea. This way, you don’t decrease employee morale, but you also don’t waste time.

People tend to run out of creative juice after a short period of time, which is why experts say the perfect amount of time for brainstorming is 30 minutes. Keep in mind that you can schedule several short brainstorming sessions then combine the ideas from each meeting. Google Jamboard makes that easy, since it can directly save all information to Google Drive. That means you don’t have to erase the whiteboard and start over every time, which makes having shorter, more frequent brainstorming sessions possible.

You can increase productivity without going over 30 minutes by preparing employees ahead of time. Let them get familiar with the subject of the meeting, and encourage them to come with some ideas, since they’ll have a few days to think. This allows them to get right to work as soon as the session starts.

A typical brainstorming session might focus mainly on the whiteboard and the person writing on it, as employees will direct their comments to the session leader. But you can increase creativity by encouraging everyone in the room to share their ideas with each other. Ask them to write down three ideas on a piece of paper and then trade those papers with coworkers so they can build on those ideas. Traditionally, you'd use scraps of paper for this task, but since Google Jamboard d lets you add digital sticky notes, you can simply ask everyone to contribute their ideas by adding new sticky notes to the board. If you worry about not being able to read everyone's handwriting, you can rest assured because Google Jamboard can convert handwriting into legible text that everyone can read.

Some people are better at coming up with ideas when they can use visual aids so you can try to encourage your team to use images, colors and interesting arrangements of words to generate ideas. This task is simple when you use Google Jamboard, since it has intuitive collaboration tools such as creative drawing tools, shape recognition feature, stickers and the ability to add pictures from any smart device. All these features create the ultimate intuitive experience, making brainstorming on a digital whiteboard easy for anyone, whether they're good at expressing ideas literally or visually.

You don’t always have to hold your meetings in the same room. In fact, if you want to boost creativity, you should change it up sometimes. Try to meet in a different room or even go outside. If you’re using Google Jamboard, you have some flexibility with where you meet, since you can place the board on a rolling stand and push it anywhere you go. You can also connect with Google Jamboard through the free app for your tablet or smartphone, making it ultra-portable.