Have you ever tried to get your team to brainstorm abreakthrough idea for a product or service only to find the processmostly yields extensions of existing ideas.

Research on creative thinking gives us these four simplesuggestions that will greatly aid in generating great ideas in ashort period of time:

Fluency: Whoever said one good idea is betterthan a thousand mediocre ones probably never invented anything.More is better. One of the inhibitors to creative thinking is yourvoice of judgment that kicks in when you think too long about theviability of your idea. The key is to generate ideas a faster thanyou can evaluate them. This will produce some unusual andimpractical ideas that will serve as triggers for novel ideas thatwork.

• Practice: Give your team a quota of at least 100 ideasin 15 minutes for each challenge. Post them on the wall for all tosee. Use these raw ideas to trigger new ideas that are both noveland viable.

Flexibility: Steve Jobs remarked, “Creativityis just connecting things.” Creating a breakthrough idea may simplybe a matter of reapplying an idea from one situation to another.For example, to improve their patient experience during hospitalstay, a medical center sent their doctors to live in a posh hotelone week and their own hospital the next. The center simply appliedthe practices of the hotel to the hospital to completely transformthe patient experience.

Learn Inc.com Columnist Jeff Degraff's remaining two Fs for effectivebrainstorming and how they can be applied in yourorganization.