Brainstorming: Brainstorming is a strategy for stimulating innovative and new

thoughts and ideas. It engages a group of people, generally ranging from five and
ten seated around a table in a classroom location, producing ideas in the form of
independent association. This generates a variety of ideas and solutions. The leader
of the group briefly defines the problem and encourages the participants to suggest
as many innovative, extreme and even wild ideas as possible and they are not
allowed to discourage or criticize the ideas of others, no matter how far fetched
such ideas may be. The idea of brainstorming is to create a climate in which people
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feel free to suggest whatever comes into their heads without caring about its
feasibility. This encourages free-wheeling and one idea sometimes leads to another
idea. This free association and unrestricted thinking may generate some novel idea
and a unique solution that may not have been thought of before.
Creativity
Creativity and critical thinking are essential for making effective and unique decisions.
The degree and depth of creativity would greatly influence the quality of the decisions
and consequently the results of actions that are based upon such decisions. Creative
thinking is important to bring about novel and unique ideas and critical thinking is
necessary to criticize and test these ideas so that they are feasible and optimally
beneficial.
Creativity, though not tangible, is an essential ingredient of organizational
growth. Without creativity, organizations would be stale, non-dynamic entities and
their employees would stagnate into nothingness. Creative and bold decisions have
contributed significantly to product improvement in inventing a new use for an
existing product as well as inventing a new product or service.
Creativity can be defined as, ‘socially recognized achievement in which
there are novel products to which one can point as evidence such as inventions,
theories, buildings, published writings, paintings and sculpture and films, laws,
institutions, medical and surgical treatments and so on’.
Creativity and creative ideas must be socially useful and recognized. Some
ideas may be creative but so eccentric that they may not have any socially
redeemable value. Accordingly, the utility and usefulness would determine the value
of creativity. This usefulness may be materially beneficial or intellectually stimulating.
Creativity primarily means originality in ideas. An original idea is considered
to be the one that has never occurred before. If such an idea is the outcome of
some established procedure of manipulating variables, it may not be considered
original. Only when a pattern of manipulations has never been applied to a given
situation before, can the results be considered new and original. A young school
student, when asked, ‘Why do we build brick houses rather than wooden houses?’
replied that it was done to save the forests. This was a novel response. The routine
response would have been that a brick house is stronger and more resistant to fire.
Accordingly, originality can be associated with ‘those ideas that result from
manipulations of variables that have not followed a rigid formula and in which the
ideas have other sources of strength’. The world as we know it now would not
have been possible without creative ideas having been put into production. The
steam engine that revolutionized the world of travel was a novel application of an
existing idea that steam under pressure tries to escape. We also have a much
better control of the world than our ancestors had and this has been because of
discovery and inventions that were based upon a strong element of originality.
Heavy rains and typhoons, once considered as acts of God, are now fairly
predictable because of original inventions in the field of meteorology. Advances in
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medical sciences have saved millions of lives and tremendously increased the
average life span. We still have a lot of areas to cover within this world and out of
it in outer space, and original ideas are being generated daily and put into practice.