[AI-Driven New Business Creation] Qualiteg Selection, Idea Creation #1: How to Use Qualiteg-Style Online Brainstorming

Hello to everyone visiting the Qualiteg blog. I'm Michele. In my work on AI-driven new businesses and marketing, there are questions I hear from clients again and again. Through this blog, I would like to offer my own answers to the challenges that anyone considering an AI-based business is likely to face.

Today I would like to talk about how to make the most of my favorite brainstorming method: "Qualiteg-style online brainstorming."

A Change of Scenery Alone Won't Produce Good Ideas

A great many clients tell me the same story: a manager announces "Let's spend all of Friday brainstorming!", books a hotel conference room on the theory that a different atmosphere might spark better ideas, and the team spends a whole day sequestered there—only to come away without the results they hoped for.

Brainstorming is a technique in which multiple participants freely share ideas in order to discover new perspectives and solutions.

The aim is to temporarily suspend criticism and evaluation and to gather as many ideas as possible, prioritizing quantity. Born in the advertising industry in the 1950s, the technique is widely used to foster creativity and strengthen team collaboration.

Today, it is also conducted effectively in remote settings using online tools.

My recommendation, plainly stated, is face-to-face online brainstorming.

Everyone brings their laptop to the meeting room and writes quietly into a chat tool such as Slack or Teams. That is Qualiteg-style online brainstorming.

First, gather everyone in the meeting room, and before starting the brainstorm, set a clear objective. Defining a concrete goal that the whole team can share, and steering the discussion toward it, makes for an efficient and effective session.

For example, you might share the direction and themes for the session like this: "Today's theme is 'How can our company launch a new smart-city business?' Let's come up with at least 20 ideas in each of three categories: community contribution, regional revitalization, and data utilization."

The path to innovation is different for every company. Qualiteg's Innovation-Cross is a flexible co-creation support program that respects what makes your company unique. We carefully analyze your current situation and challenges, then formulate a customized strategy tailored to your needs. From a diverse menu of services—idea workshops, hackathon planning, new-business workshops, applied AI technology, and more—we propose the combination best suited to your company and provide comprehensive support for generating innovation through external collaboration.

We help you realize the kind of innovation that is "hard to achieve alone," at your company's own pace and in its own style. Experienced specialist consultants with a deep understanding of industry characteristics and corporate culture will accompany you flexibly on your innovation journey.

Ideas Can Be Shared Without Second-Guessing

In spoken brainstorming sessions, I think ideas often get stifled: the people who like to talk go on forever, junior staff hold back out of deference to their manager's opinion, and everyone reads the room too carefully—"What if they think this sounds strange?"

Successful brainstorming requires the active engagement of every participant. In spoken sessions, facilitation usually falls to a team leader or a subject-matter expert, and that person ends up carrying a heavy load—calling on people in turn, taking notes, and often unable to contribute ideas of their own.

I am sure facilitators do their best to create an atmosphere in which everyone feels comfortable speaking up and to give everyone an equal opportunity to contribute. And since it is important not to reject ideas and to respect every opinion, I trust they run their sessions that way.

With Qualiteg-style online brainstorming, however, no such facilitator diplomacy is needed—and yet every participant can actively generate ideas.

Fully Participatory, Engaged Brainstorming with No Facilitation Required

"Please write down at least five ideas each for a community-contribution smart city. You have ten minutes." Give an instruction like this, and everyone turns to their screens and writes in earnest.

Overlap with what others have written is perfectly fine, and since everyone writes in silence, there is no need to wait for the boss to finish talking before you can speak.

Best of all, there is no time spent carefully commenting on each opinion or transcribing it onto sticky notes—yet afterward you have everything in one easy-to-scan list that is simple to sort and categorize. I highly recommend this approach.

It is especially well received by employees in their twenties and in engineer-heavy organizations, where satisfaction is high: "I could say what I wanted to say without worrying about the people around me."

Another hallmark of Qualiteg-style online brainstorming is that participants can freely build on other people's ideas and keep adding new ones. Please give it a try—I would love to hear your feedback.

Thank you for reading this column to the end. At Qualiteg, we provide training and consulting on AI technology and on how to plan new businesses. If this has piqued your interest, or if you have specific requirements in mind, please feel free to reach out through the inquiry form here.

We also run popular workshops for those who want to master the steps of new-business creation. The training focuses on having each participant think about the business from an executive's point of view, and the content is suitable not only for planning staff but also for their counterparts in engineering, design, and marketing.

We sincerely look forward to hearing from you. Please stay tuned for the next column.