ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews some of the more popular forms of brainstorming. These include classical brainstorming, wildest idea variant, round-robin brainstorming, Gordon-Little variant, trigger method, brainwriting and brainlining. Brainstorming is perhaps the most popular of the creative problem-solving techniques. The term 'brainstorming' has become a commonly used word in the English language as a generic term for creative thinking. The generation phase is separate from the judgement phase of thinking. Brainstorming is a traditional approach to creative thinking. The whole idea of brainstorming is that people's thoughts act to stimulate one another and produce a chain reaction of ideas. Brainstorming can be used to help find solutions to many different kinds of open-ended problem for example, trouble-shooting problems and problems where a large number of ideas are required The Gordon-Little variation is an interesting one, but one of its drawbacks is that it doesn't readily allow for problem definition unless, of course, the method itself is used to define the problem.
