Creativity Unleashed

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Creativity Software - Idea Structuring

Ideas flow in a very organic, non-linear fashion. Luckily there is plenty of software available to help you to get on top of your ideas, pull them into a structure and organize them.

A first decision is which style to go for. We prefer mindmapping software for brainstorms and presenting information, and OneNote for collecting, structuring and retrieving information.

Of the mind mappers, we recommend three products - MindManager, iMindMap and Freemind. Freemind is a good way to start, as it's free and will give you a feel for mind mapping on a computer before, perhaps. It's also the only one available for Linux. Of the commercial products, iMindMap produces the most natural, flowing mind maps. It is
particularly good if you want organic maps that reflect the way you visualize the information. For quick inputting and automatic formatting, particularly if you want to share information with Microsoft Office products, and for a superbly slick look, MindManager has the edge.

OneNote stands alone, but we do very much recommend it for collecting information together, organizing it in projects and retrieving it.

Another category we call idea bubblers, which work best for green field thinking.
These tend to be rather like an electronic version of brainstorming with Post-it Notes (though obviously with much more sophistication).

There are a lot of similarities between The Creative Thinker and Visual Concepts, both using hexagons to represent and group ideas. For us, Visual Concepts probably has the edge. Decision Explorer is a rather different beast, which we can only really recommend if you need its very special capabilities or are a decision support professional.
Shadow Optical Illusion

Creativity Software - Idea Generation

If it seems strange that something as mechanical as software can improve creativity, don't worry. It's not the software that's creative, it's you. All the software does is act as a stimulant for your creative ideas.

Software to help with idea generation is mostly a lot cruder than idea structuring - and to be honest you will generally do as well or better using a book like Instant Creativity.

 

We do have a free piece of software based on Imagination Engineering, which you are welcome to try, but it is no longer supported and is provided as is. It was designed for Windows 95, and with recent versions of Windows, while it will probably run, you are unlikely to be able to save files. This is a shame, as it is really rather good. Give it a try if interested. Click here to download.

 

The only other non-trivial piece of software we are aware of is the Axon Idea Processor. There’s a lot in it, but it’s not the easiest software to get on top of, so you need to be prepared to put some time in to make it really useful. It’s worth a try, though and there’s a free trial ‘lite’ version to give it a go.

Featured item - detail from a MindManager mind map