When in college i tried to come up with a process of generating ideas each time I had to solve an academic problem, and I often liked to had all the heavy burden of coming up with the solutions by myself, and I was proud of it and even some of my friends liked it and dislike it at the same time, in some way. But I always had the difficulty of expressing my ideas verbally or writing them, the only way I managed to explain them was with pictures and concepts, and those got the picture would later on explain it in easier words.
One day, I had to do a class project with friends I didn’t usually work with, but to whom I felt great respect and admiration. We had to come up with a system or devices that would help quadriplegic people drink beverages. We started with a group session and trying to come up with ideas; but every time one had an idea it was almost impossible to describe it, and we argued a lot because we did not understand each other, and I ended up, without noticing it, getting mentally apart from the group session. I was in my whole world inside my mind thinking about the system, its movements, its materials, the person using it, the people’s perception, and even picturing it in front of me as it was there, and every time I found … “oh this things has this problem.. this might happened wrong, this is too big and not pleasant to the users, etc.”.- It was not until a friend suggested the following:
“We are going nowhere with this, I really don’t understand you and you are to dam stubborn like to understand me or being understood right now, so let’s divide the thinking process, lets first establish the primordial functions… ”..and so on..
We did and each of us had the challenge to come up with ideas for some functions, or parts of the solution. One day we sat together and found a simple solution that none of us thought before, it was a great combination of each individual ideas, or rather the concepts underlying those ideas. The result was that the system we made came up extremely cheap, it was extremely easy to use, easy to make, pleasant to the eye, portable, and actually one quadriplegic person liked it.

At the end I realized that I might have never come up with that idea, I was too blind, and that kind of systematic team work gave us great results.

I just wanted to share this, and reading your post tells me that it wasn’t just luck, or a wonder that we came with the solution, it was rather the final approach we took into attacking the problem that gave us the ideas we needed. It turned out it was the best project in the whole class and even in front of the “jury” of local businessmen that attend to the presentations.

Tomorrow starts the Exposgestion Caribe here in Barranquilla, Colombia and I hope to learn a lot from Mr. Amnon Levav about innovation and SIT.
Thank you again for the post.