No matter who you are or what you do, you inevitably face the struggle of generating fresh ideas that will push your work in productive new directions. By now, however, you know you can't just lock yourself or your group in a room, stare at an empty whiteboard, and wait for inspiration. Only when ideation and innovation processes are well-designed and well-facilitated can you and your group generate an abundance of creative solutions. How can you ensure that your efforts pay off with more and better ideas?

In Idea Stormers, Bryan Mattimore explains the how, what, and why of successful innovation and ideation. He presents a diverse selection of easy-to-learn idea-generating techniques such as "brainwalking," turning your worst ideas into surprising solutions, wishing your way to real results, and many more. He also provides a framework for how anyone tasked with getting creative results from a group-what he calls a "facilitating leader"-can put these techniques to work. Mattimore has created and applied these practices over years of leading more than two hundred innovation consulting assignments at major organizations, and he shares behind-the-scenes stories of the many real-wolrd creative challenges these techniques helped to solve, such as how Ben & Jerry's named a new strawberry fudge flavor, how one division of IBM reimagined and transformed their organizational culture, and how the Lutheran Society of America successfully launched a new fundraising program.

With a wide range of tested idea-generation and innovation techniques, Idea Stormers is an indispensable and entertaining guide to developing original, practical solutions-not to mention true breakthroughs-for even the most intractable-seeming creative challenges.