Where To Search for New Ideas? – Thinkibility Nibble

A surgical team in a hospital realised that their activities became more and more complex, partly because of the treatments that they were offering but also by an increase of the number of people involved. They looked for better ideas, outside their box of thinking. They visited an aircraft carrier, a pit stop at auto races, a plumber’s skills contest and a high risk chemical plant. What kind of ideas may they have got? From the seemingly chaos at a flight deck of an aircraft carrier: How repairs are practised as fast as possible at pit stop: From a plumbers’ skill contest:to get ideas how to repair clogged arteries: They also realised that they were far behind aviation regarding safety standards and creating a “fail safe” culture. They approached safety expert from NASA and chemical and other high risk industries. Slowly medical teams are introducing Failure Mode and Effect Analysis, a structural approach to decrease errors.  There are lots of ideas that can be derived from outside your area of knowledge and your circle of colleagues. There are lots of areas of experience you are not normally connected to and which may be loosely related to your job. Perhaps there are no connections at all between your domain of operating and where fresh but proven ideas can be found. A department of accountants is worrying about the increasing data they had to process and at the same time the increasing demand for reliability and speed. What do you think they will turn to? They will ask the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, a European research organization whose purpose is to operate the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. How do they process large data sets?