Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a group creativity technique designed to produce a "large quantity of ideas without regard to the quality of ideas" (Rickards, 1999) for the solution to a problem. It was popularized by Osborn (1953). The basic rules of brainstorming include: focus on quantity, no criticism, unusual ideas are welcome, combine and improve ideas. Brainstorming can be thought of as a search process, the target of the search being innovative and useful ideas (Clark, 1958; Rawlinson, 1970; Nickerson, 1999).