Imagine attending a meeting at which you and your colleagues have to invent an idea for a new business. The only instruction you're given is to "think outside the box." The task is so vague that you'd promptly give up.

Coyne, Clifford, and Dye propose a better approach: structured brainstorming. Through this process, you pose concrete questions that focus people's thinking in ways that spark fresh ideas. For example: "What businesses could we invent if we reproduced something children love in an extreme form for adults?" This notion has catalyzed creation of 25+ new product categories, including gourmet jelly beans, Spider-Man movies, and paintball. You also orchestrate the brainstorming process to help people work effectively together; for example, sequestering all the pushy people in one group so they can't dominate the others.