Creative Thinking Techniques

Author: Derrick Brown and Jan Kusiak

This extract from IRM’s training material looks at how systematic, creative thinking techniques can be used to design practical solutions to business problems. The first step in developing a solution is to identify and define the problem - see the IRM paper Problem Analysis Techniques. Using the problem definition as a starting point we can apply a number of creative thinking techniques to identify potential solutions, then further analyse and refine these to give us an optimum solution for the problem at hand. This paper discusses some of the successful creative thinking techniques used by business analysts and describes a generic model which can be used to guide the process.