Review - The Creative Thinker

When brainstorming, it’s traditional to make notes on a flipchart. This makes it difficult to take the ideas and structure them. Sometimes scraps of paper or PostIt notes are used, so they can be shuffled around. The Scottish company, Idon, goes one step further, producing magnetic shapes that can be scribbled on, then moved around a board. Usually these are hexagonal to allow for a range of layouts.

Idon also has an electronic equivalent. The Creative Thinker is an on-screen tool to draw shapes, links and notes. As usual, these can be enhanced by using different colours and fonts. In principle you could do all this with a flowcharter, but The Creative Thinker incorporates plenty of examples of different structures to facilitate idea generation, problem solving, scenario planning and more. A typical session would involve generating a range of ideas, then grouping them using an enveloping shape referred to as a cluster. For instance, if you were looking to improve your profitability, you might group ideas together that involve cost reduction, developing new products, or changing your target market.

This is a significant improvement over Idon's first software product, as the user interface now makes more sensible use of double clicks to progress from screen to screen. There's a rather crude brainstorm mode for getting things into hexagons quickly, an 'oblique thoughts' database of random inspirations (often a little twee) and good connectivity between models and to external applications. There are also plenty of examples to see how the product can be used. However it still feels a little fiddly and the use of a bee icon as pointer, complete with flapping wings, rapidly becomes irritating rather than just twee.

Even so this is a powerful example of the 'idea bubble' school of organizing information and well worth a look at.

There does not appear to be a downloadable trial version of The Creative Thinker, but you can order online from their site.