The Importance of Collaboration in the Process of Ideation
You’ve probably heard one of the many idioms about how “teamwork makes the dream work” or “two heads are better than one” or “heavy hands make light work.” But the idea of a group project tends to elicit sighs and rolled eyes from everyone involved, so is it better to simply work alone?
The four elements of innovation are ideation, implementation, value creation, and — you guessed it — collaboration. Getting insights from other people can help you build on your idea or look at a problem through a different lens.
Sometimes when you’re stuck, all you need to get moving is another set of eyes.
Productive Collaboration
Playing well with others can sometimes feel challenging to say the least, especially when you get the sense that someone isn’t pulling their weight or is being overly competitive.
For collaboration to aid ideation, it’s essential for the people working together to have clear roles and a foundation of trust.
Let’s say you’re writing the next best-selling novel, and you want someone to read through it to get their opinion. Instead of simply asking, “let me know what you think,” you can ask directive questions or for them to give feedback on specific aspects of the portion they’re reading. For example, instead of critiquing your word choice, you can ask them to tell you if the plot makes sense and the narrative tracks.
In this case, your role is the author, and their role is the editor/audience. Their tasks as the reader are definitively set, so they don’t overstep their boundaries or leave you wanting more.
Setting roles and tasks allows people to stay accountable for their roles in the collaboration process.
Strategic Collaboration
Unless you’re the Jackson Pollock of collaboration, you can’t just gather everyone into a room and expect magic to happen.
Successful collaboration involves strategizing and setting goals for the project. Opening the door for creativity begins with putting every person in the best spot for them to succeed. This means that everyone will have a job that plays to their innovative strengths because if you’re not taking advantage of all your team’s assets, you’re missing out on maximum ideation.
Open strategizing with your team allows you to
- Listen and Explore
- Learn and Adjust
- Focus and Align
- Link and Leverage
Keeping an open mind and allowing yourself to listen to your collaborators will help you grow in ways you never imagined possible.
Organized Collaboration
We live in a world where you can collaborate with someone who lives halfway around the world from you. When it comes to long-distance collaborations, organization is crucial.
Sure, you can send texts and emails back and forth to each other, but it requires a lot of digging that wastes time when you try to find it again.
Having a way to manage your ideas and find your information again quickly is essential for optimized collaboration. You need the ability to process data in real-time no matter where you or your partner are working from.
Let’s say you’re on a team of researchers spread around the country collecting information. Once you’re all done collecting data, you meet back up in your original city to analyze the data. But everything is so unorganized that you can’t tell what info is from what day or if you’re missing some documents. It’s hard to be productive when you have to clean up the clutter.
But, if your team uses a collaborative platform that provides you different features such as audio transcription, databases, mind boards, focus-writing panels, and annotation pads, you can get right to work when you meet back up. While out in the field, you have a place to upload the data at the end of every day so everyone else on the team can see it. You can begin to connect some of the dots before you even reunite. When you do get back to working together, all of your information is clearly labeled and in a searchable format that saves you from wondering where something went.
We created Scrintal to improve collaboration, not make it more of a headache. Our supercharged notebook allows you and your team to put all of your notes, videos, and images in one place for everyone to access. You can zoom in and out of your research and give the team a tour of your work. Proving your results by showing your process has never been easier.
If you’d like to learn more about Scrintal, join our waitlist and become an early user of our platform, click here.
