[...]... with brand-new ideas One way to practice connecting and combining ideas is to try your hand at the weekly New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest Each week the last page of the New Yorker has a cartoon without a caption Readers submit captions, and the following week three are chosen to showcase in the magazine All readers are invited to vote on their favorites The cartoons always contain images that rarely... something totally brand new was created using the two familiar objects The unintended-use solutions from the Japanese audience included attaching an inverted baseball cap to the wall with thumbtacks to make a small basketball hoop, making an earring stand out of an egg cup and a sponge, and using lipstick and nail polish to paint pictures In a similar vein, an art exhibit at San Francisco International Airport... we didn’t have ears?” Again, this exercise stretches the imagination and prepares everyone for the real work ahead Although it might feel a bit awkward at first, it is important to mark the transition into a brainstorming session in some way and to give the participants a chance to warm up their imagination, just as an athlete warms up before a race What are the rules of brainstorming? Real rules exist... have one conversation where everyone contributes Several years ago I heard that Facebook had a policy of “two-pizza teams.” No team was bigger than could be fed with two pizzas, which allowed for optimum communication and collaboration Once a team got larger than that, it was broken in two This is a great guideline for brainstorming, too With six to eight people (and a couple of pizzas) you have a. .. people he can along the way He knows that airports and airplanes are filled with people from all walks of life, from all professions, and with an endless variety of skills and interests He talks with everyone in his path and makes valuable connections.7 Although I don’t make unnecessary stops during my travels, I do make a point of talking with the people I meet along the way, and I almost always learn something... because of the extensive cross-pollination of ideas between individuals and companies In Silicon Valley the firms are concentrated in a small area, which leads to more informal interactions and easier formal connections There are also very low cultural barriers to communication between people of different backgrounds and socioeconomic levels.5 For example, at a school baseball game in the San Francisco... engineer starting a new company Their casual conversations while watching their kids play ball often lead to helpful advice, introductions to potential employees, or even funding for a new venture This is exactly what happened when Mark Zdeblick, an engineer and entrepreneur, was eating dinner at a local café Two little girls from a nearby table started playing with Mark’s son Mark began a conversation with... Information at the University of California at Berkeley She has done extensive work on communities that are primed for innovation and has studied the critical factors at play in determining whether a city will be a hub of creativity Her book Regional Advantage looks at the factors that contribute to the high levels of innovation and entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley Essentially, Silicon Valley innovation... by a tick that has already bitten a lizard and is now immune This surprising and important finding was only revealed because the scientists were willing and able to connect seemingly unrelated observations and patterns Ideas can be drawn from anywhere and connected at any time Mir Imran, the founder and chairman of InCube Labs, draws inspiration for his medical inventions by connecting and combining... is to capture all that happened Take photos of all of the ideas, make notes about the best ones, and save all the materials that can be saved They are the valuable products of the brainstorming session The person or team who is in charge of making the decisions about the project can mine this massive collection of diverse ideas and decide which ones to pursue These materials can be revisited at any time . solutions from the Japanese audience included attaching an inverted baseball cap to the wall with thumbtacks to make a small basketball hoop, making an earring stand out of an egg cup and a sponge,. shared vocabulary, and a set of tools that you can use right away to evaluate and increase your own creativity and that of your team, organization, and community. INNOVATION ENGINE The three parts on. making soup and as monumental as solving the massive problems that face the world. I teach a course on creativity and innovation at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, affectionately called