Group Genius

The Creative Power of Collaboration
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Collaboration is the real secret secret to breakthriugh creativity–not a lone genius having an “Aha!” flash of inspiration.

Genuinely new ideas are never the brainchild of a single person. Instead, they emerge bottom up from the creative efforts of a large number of people, each of whom nudge the idea forward or add a little twist here or there. What finally comes out the other end of the creative process is an idea cannot truthfully be said to be the exclusive result of any one person’s thinking. Instead, all kinds of different people have added a little bit here and deleted what doesn’t work over there.

From an organizational perspective, if you want to generate more earth-shattering innovations, make it easier for people to work together on new ideas. Install collaboration as the central framework of your innovation projects, and don’t forget to invite your customers and your peers to be part of the overall process. Find new and better ways to help people collaborate using emerging communication technology and you will be well be well positioned to see some highly creative ideas come forward.

Above all, don’t delegate the responsibility for being innovative to some research and development unit or other designated part of your organization. Instead, make it possible and feasible for everyone to collaborate on developing new ideas. That’s the only way you can fully utilize the combined brain power of your people to best effect.

Innovation is what drives today’s economy, and our hopes for the future–as individuals and organizations–lie in finding creative solutions to pressing problems. My goal is to reveal the unique power of collaboration to generate innovation. And it’s my hope that you’ll use these new insights about group group genius to create more effective collaborations in your own life–at work, at home and in your community. We can all tap into the creative power of collaboration to make out own insights more frequent and more successful. Forget the myths about historical inventors: the truth is always a story of group genius. And today’s innovations emerge from ever more complex organizations and many interacting teams. Group genius creates today’s cutting-edge products.

–Keith Sawyer