Remember that old belief about innovation being, Inspiration! Eureka! I’ve got it!

Well, forget it. An article in today’s International Herald Tribune, citing serious research, debunks it. Those flashes of insight that seem like inspiration actually arise from complex interactions with other people. The implications for entrepreneurs are crucial. If you want to build a powerful innovation process, that generates more than a one-time idea (which in itself is never enough for sustained business success) – build a powerful team. Make teamwork a part of your company’s innovation culture and DNA. And, by the way – forget about this brainstorming notion.  Brainstorming – unfocused ideation – fails to generate usable business-grounded ideas. 

Here is an excerpt from the article:

Despite the enduring myth of the lone genius, innovation does not take place in isolation. Truly productive invention requires the meeting of minds from myriad perspectives, even if the innovators themselves don’t always realize it. Keith Sawyer, a researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, calls this “group genius,” and in his book of the same name he introduces a scientific method called interaction analysis to the study of creativity. Through studying verbal cues, body language and incremental adjustments during team innovation efforts, Sawyer shows that what we experience as a flash of insight has actually percolated in social interaction for quite some time.

“Innovation today isn’t a sudden break with the past, a brilliant insight that one lone outsider pushes through to save the company,” he said. “Just the opposite: Innovation today is a continuous process of small and constant change, and it’s built into the culture of successful companies.”

It’s a perspective shared broadly in corporate America. Ed Catmull, president of Pixar Animation Studios and Disney Animation Studios, describes what he calls “collective creativity” in a cover article in the September issue of Harvard Business Review.

“Creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working together to solve a great many problems,” he writes. “Creativity must be present at every level of every artistic and technical part of the organization.”

So, we all should brainstorm our way through the day, right? Wrong. That tool, introduced by Alex Osborn in 1948, has been proved in a number of studies over the last 20 years to be far less effective than generally believed.

“He had it right in terms of group process,” said Drew Boyd, a businessman based in Cincinnati who blogs and speaks often about innovation. “But he had it wrong in terms of the method.”

Brainstorming, Boyd says, is the most overused and underperforming tool in business today. Traditionally, brainstorming revolves around the false premise that to get good ideas, a group must generate a large list from which to cherry-pick. But researchers have shown repeatedly that individuals working alone generate more ideas than groups acting in concert.

Instead of identifying a problem and then seeking solutions, Boyd suggests turning the process around: Break down successful products and processes into separate components, then study those parts to find other potential uses. This process of “systematic inventive thinking,” which evolved from the work of the Russian engineer and scientist Genrich Altshuller, creates “pre-inventive” ideas that then can be expanded into innovations.

“The best innovations occur when you have networks of people with diverse backgrounds gathering around a problem,” said Robert Fishkin, president and chief executive of Reframeit, a Web 2.0 company that creates virtual space in a Web browser where users can share comments and highlights on any site. “We need to get better at collaborating in noncompetitive ways across company and organizational lines.”