Creativity Central [Marty Baker]

An exclusive interview with Markus Mettler, CEO, Co-founder and IdeaDirector.

In the most elegant sense of the word, the Swiss city of Biel is a factory town. Both the SwatchGroup and Rolex have built factories and production facilities here. But neatly tucked away on Biel’s Aarbergstrasse is another kind of factory. It’s called BrainStore, and it produces an equally valuable commodity -- ideas. Recently, Creativity Central had a conversation with Markus Mettler, CEO, Co-founder and IdeaDirector for BrainStore.

In 1990, Mettler and his two partners created a company with a simple premise; bring young people full of inspiration together with decision-makers who need breakthrough ideas. A unique method was created: Industrial IdeaProduction.
“From the very beginning, we have always integrated the fresh, unfiltered inspirations of young lateral thinkers,” says Mettler. “We do this to break away routine habits and behavior, and expand the potential for breakthrough ideas. It is crucial to our process to integrate these unbiased views in every IdeaProduction – they are the best innovation catalysts.”

“In modern companies,” says Mettler, “all work steps are systematized, planned and efficient. Very few things left to chance. Only one product is still produced just as unsystematically as it was 300 years ago --ideas. The factory model isn’t merely a metaphor for us, it’s how we systematically approach the business of generating ideas that work.”

Global clients such as  BMW, BASF, DuPont, Procter & Gamble, Tupperware, Abbott and Nestlé have readily embraced the concept and have fueled the growth of BrainStore.

Mettler and his partners believe that you can’t rely on occasional flashes of brilliance if you want to produce a steady stream of quality ideas. Instead, BrainStore approaches the manufacturing of ideas with as much precision and benchmarking as is generally applied to the manufacturing of assembly-line products.

“We typically produce an average of 10,000 raw ideas for each project. We then use our proven methodology to evaluate and select ideas that meet the client’s criteria,” adds Mettler. “It’s not just eliminating ideas you don’t like, it’s discovering ideas you really like. We recombine ideas and inspirations to help us get closer to breakthrough ideas.”
BrainStore's IdeaProduction process is called the IdeaMachine. This innovative process includes five key phases: IdeaBoosting, Compression, Decision, Management, and Implementation Support.

The core of the IdeaBoosting phase is a group of  30 to 300 people called the CreativeTeam. It consists of client employees, potential consumers, lateral thinkers and a management team. Depending on the complexity of the project, the team can draw on a network of more than 5,000 freelancers to generate thousands of ideas in record time -- about 1,000 per hour.

The ideas collected in the “boosting” phase are then presented in a surprising way. “In IdeaCity, we transform the ideas into various media,” says Mettler. “We discovered early on that people respond to the medium as much as the message. So, we make it possible for the team to review ideas in a variety of divergent media including newspapers, books, movies or web sites.”

I think the value of BrainStore’s factory model is that no part of ideation process is undervalued. Everything is linked. When the team arrives at 15 to 60 ideas that can be compared, it is done with a process that helps eliminates bias. Each idea is placed on a board with a title, a description of the idea, and an explanatory image. Then, each participant is invited to rate the idea on a 1-10 scale.

Because BrainStore isn’t “selling” any one solution or idea, this process allows individual ideas to compete on a level playing field. “There are some ideas everyone likes and other ideas that are polarizing,” Mettler adds. “Often we revisit and combine polarizing ideas because they are the ideas that have the most potential.
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By breaking the creative process into steps and developing tools to optimize those steps, BrainStore is able to duplicate its successes. "We're striving to perfect our system in terms of speed and efficiency," says Mettler. “And like any successful factory, we will continue to evolve our processes to deliver a superior product.”
I think the remarkable success of BrainStore goes beyond the creative pyrotechnics and experiential atmosphere of factory itself. Like Solution People in Chicago or IDEO, they take the idea business seriously. 

BrainStore  has grown from a simple storefront office selling ideas at $10 a project to multi-million dollar company.

Now that’s a great idea.

If any of my readers would like more detailed information, you can visit http://www.brainstore.com or you can contact Markus Mettler directly Markus.mettler@brainstore.com. BrainStore has recently opened an idea factory in California.