Ideas Unlimited: Capturing Global Brainpower

By Bob Krone and Salena Gregory-Krone

This short book tells the story of the most effective qualitative idea generating method now in existence. It has ninety years of global validation across diverse organizations and cultures. Ideas Unlimited instructs you on how to benefit your work, life, and your organization, through its use. The fundamental principle of Ideas Unlimited is tha

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stratton Press
• Release date: Mar 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643454191

Book preview

Dedication

We dedicate this book to those who understand that the world’s primary improvement sources are ideas and that the improvement and survival of humankind hinge on capturing the right ideas.

Foreword

This is an important book for top managers, professionals, and any individuals concerned with the subject of creativity or inventive thinking. Creativity has been one of the dominant subjects of study for many centuries.

In the past decades, there have been repeated efforts to develop various skills and methods in creative thinking and idea generation. Readers have been deluged with many of them. Some imposing examples are Brainstorming, Delphi, Kepner-Tregoe, Lateral Thinking, TRIZ, and Invention Highway. Each of these methods provides some measurement of insight. But none of them have unlocked the central enigma of creativity and its relationship to improvement of organizational success as well as Ideas Unlimited. Artificial intelligence is bringing new technology to the task.

Dr. Robert Krone, the lead author, is president of Kepler Space Institute and Emeritus and professor of system management at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, USA. He is an educator, space scientist, aviation expert, pilot, system analyst, policy scientist, and management consultant. He has come very close to the heart of the matter as he has pioneered the Ideas Unlimited method in creative idea generation for the last thirty-five years. This 2018 book is a revision of the first instructional text of Ideas Unlimited: Capturing Global Brainpower by Dr. Bob and Sue Krone, 2007. This group survey method has ninety years’ validation since it first originated as the Crawford Slip Method. That validation of an efficient and effective idea generator has been across global cultures, industries, public and private entities, and profit and nonprofit organizations.

This book includes many original and provocative insights, which distinctively differentiate Ideas Unlimited from other methods in existence. Some of those valuable insights follow.

First, in defining creativity, there are three basic approaches: (1) analysis and motivation of creative people, (2) development and practice of the process of creative thinking, and (3) investigation of the results or the creative products. The Ideas Unlimited method constitutes the three approaches simultaneously in comparison with other methods, which usually focus on only one or two approaches.

Second, more recently, the creativity issue is increasing in business and government organizational importance as leadership searches for how to link creativity cultivated among the individual members to improvement of the organizational competitiveness. Krone’s method is to provide management with the fundamental of capturing creativity of individual employees to achieve organizational innovation by bridging the creative ideas of the workers to strategies and policies of the organizations.

This is the most important substance of the method, which is characterized by identifying and solving the problems through sourcing the creative ideas and know-how of the people who are working in the companies. This method enables top executives to effectively and efficiently achieve organizational innovation through the simple process of cultivating creative people.

The process can be made possible by adopting the flexibility in selection of the participants to be within a focus group, from single person to many, and targeting issues for organizational improvement, qualitative data gathering based on written, instead of oral, responses. Insuring anonymity for the respondent removes the fear factor for employees.

As a professor of management and university president, I have had a significant involvement in teaching and consulting in creative thinking. In response to the recent business trend, I have worked on development of a business executive training program focusing on creativity. Main focus of the program is on an organizational performance-oriented management system. The creativity here is considered as a departure from existing knowledge, skills, experiences, and know-how through facilitation by creative thinking methods. Why does the whole process happen? It is necessary for creativity to have motives by which the departure from now toward a better future can be made effectively. The motives are normally induced by social and economic challenges such as market pull and technological push in a dynamics of kinetic environment.

In designing the executive program of creative management, I found Krone’s Ideas Unlimited method distinctively suitable for the nature of the program. The fundamental of the Ideas Unlimited method is a self-contained organizational performance-based creative management process. Therefore, with certainty, Krone’s valuable contribution will be highly appreciated by top management and professionals who are concerned with creativity-based management. The executive training programs my company, KIM-U, develops will benefit by adopting his method as a main component.

Professor Bob Krone and I have been friends and colleagues with interests in the same field for almost forty years. I have asked him to publish a book on his Ideas Unlimited method some many years ago. With great pleasure, I congratulate Dr. Bob and Salena Gregory-Krone on their coauthorship of the 2018 revision of this landmark book, now available to readers.

This is an instructional guidebook for the Ideas Unlimited method for either its online or manual versions. The richness and acuity of the authors’ expertise come through on every chapter and page of the book with clarity and simplicity. The readers who want to develop their own creativity skills, while learning how to increase their organization’s performance, will find the book practical and inspiring.

Kim Kee Young pix

Kee Young Kim, PhD

Chairman of the board of directors, Samil Foundation

Member, National Academy of Sciences, Republic of Korea

Emeritus professor of business administration, Yonsei University

Former president of Kwangwoon University, Seoul, Korea

Preface

This 2019 second edition of this book updates for readers the continued applications of this remarkably effective, qualitative idea-generation method. The validation of its theory and practice has occurred globally and cross-culturally since 1925. Its relevance for problem identification and solutions will continue to increase through the twenty-first century. The escalating capabilities of electronic communications will continue to facilitate the penetration of the method to places on the globe where there have not been applications to date but where it is needed. Ideas Unlimited has been further facilitated by the revolutionary results of global electronic networking and social media.

The internet also permits a simplified strategy for presenting Ideas Unlimited in this book format. Twenty years ago, it would have been necessary to include complete details of the method’s history, applications, theory, benefits, and bibliography. Now an internet search can update sources for those details. This permits us to keep the book short with the fundamental description, principles, capabilities, tools, processes, and techniques.

You may reproduce portions of the book for educational purposes with professional accreditation. A caution we give readers is not to use Ideas Unlimited the first time in a career-critical application. If your next promotion depends on how well you gather data, get some experience with this method before risking an application that could bring discredit to you as an analyst and/or misrepresent the method. On the surface, it looks simple, but Ideas Unlimited is an entire idea-gathering and analysis system. It is different from other idea-generating tools. You need to experiment with the method in nonsensitive environments and to learn its multiple strengths and how those strengths will not be achieved without understanding of the entire system and its principles. After thirty-five years with the method,