Generating Creative Ideas for Business Through Brainwriting, Brainstorming and Focus Groups

The focus group (a less formal forum) included a medical doctor, two residents, two community members, two family members of the residents, nurses, director of nursing, the administrator, a member of the board of the directors, an IT specialist and human resource personnel. A focus group is a specialized group interview in which group members are not told exactly what the interviewer wants to

Brainstorming- To brainstorm is a prewriting tool used to generate topics and subtopics for writing.

This activity is designed to encourage students to appreciate the process of generating business idea with limited funds. Anybody can come up with a good business idea regardless of their age, race, experience and others.

The students will sit on the reading/writing rug, this is where writing instruction happens daily. (This will be part of their daily program, so the students will be familiar with this type of whole group instruction).

Another advantage of group brainstorming is that it helps everyone involved to feel that they’ve contributed to the end solution, and it reminds people that other people have creative ideas to offer. What’s more, brainstorming is fun, and it can be great for team-building!

Flexible and inexpensive, focus groups consist of six to ten participants (Hartman, 2004, p. 408). Additionally, a moderator guides the discussion among its panel members that allows researchers to observe real-time verbal responses and nonverbal cues (Hartman, 2004, p. 402; Cooper & Schindler, 2014, p. 160). Focus groups moderators also have the ability to introduce new ideas to gain a greater understanding of concerns from respondents (Hartman, 2004, p. 402). However, a concern with focus group is the lack of anonymity due to the face-to-face participation.

This article represents a focus group type of qualitative research. According to Qualitative Research Consultants Association (2015), in focus group qualitative research, a group of individuals who share a need, life circumstance, or habit relevant to the research issue(s) at hand are led in a discussion by a modulator. The focus group discussions often include between two to ten respondents, and are often held face to face. They can also be conducted remotely through videoconferencing, teleconferencing, or

Focus group: a small interview of people who are brought together to discuss a particular topic.

The focus group is the mostly widely used in qualitative tools. A focus group discussion is to collect data through a group (8 to 10 participants) interaction and a moderator. The main objective of a focus group is to get in depth answers of consumers, and understand consumer attitudes and behavior on its products (Warren, C. A. B., & Karner, T. X., 2010). The group participants are selected carefully and discussions based on their experiences and views. In addition, researchers or clients can use one –way mirrors to observe participants’ opinions and behaviors. Moreover,

A Focus group is defined as a research technique that collects data through a group interaction, on a given topic from the researcher. Along with this definition are some essential components. Firstly, it states that, focus groups are research methods devoted to data collection. Secondly, it signifies the interaction of group discussion as a source of data. Lastly, it acknowledges the active role of researchers in establishing the group discussion in order to collect data (David, 1996.p.130).

Change, creativity and innovation are essential elements for survival and growth of an organization. Creativity is vital for the birth of fresh and beneficial ideas. Creative thinking allows groups and individuals to solve problems or stimulate to think differently in order to bring forth fruitful ideas. The above mentioned creative thinking enabled our team of six different personalities to come together and implement a plan to solve a complex problem in a hospital. Our assigned task was to recommend a plan in order to alleviate hospital readmission among elderly population within thirty days of discharge. In this paper the author is narrating the team dynamics, functionalities and personal competencies in the process of recommending a change in the system. As a member in the innovation leadership team the author is also reflecting on the assessment, capacity for innovation in the organization which is the hospital where the team is assigned.

     Our assignment is to create and promote an innovative product. In developing a new product, we started with an idea generation. This is a systematic search for new-product ideas. Companies go through many ideas before they come to find some good ones. We had to do the same thing. We thought of many ideas on our own. It was more of an internal idea source as opposed to going outside of our partnership for ideas. Our first idea was a restaurant with half of it an actual restaurant and the other half an automobile tuner shop. The next idea was a new energy drink that would be less costly and better tasting. Our next idea came up when we were sitting

Focus groups are a prominent method of enquiry, regularly used within the field of social science and in particular, qualitative research. The focus group practice involves a number of participants having an open discussion on a specific topic, set by a researcher. The researcher acts as a moderator to aid discussion by using probes to collect desirable data. This process is recorded and transcripts are used to interpret and analyse given information.

A small group of people, considered to be representative of the target segment, invited to openly discuss products or issues at their leisure time in a relaxed environment. (Market Intelligence) This method is useful in providing a qualitative data. It is inexpensive to conduct, it

1. Idea Generation: Idea generation is the actual development of ideas that can become products or services. Either competitors, employees, suppliers, or customers can be the generators of these ideas. Idea generation is the first step in the offered get development process and is often the least costly financially speaking.