How does mind mapping software help you to innovate?

As a Project Manager, I use mindmapping software to help create many of my deliverables, run brainstorming sessions and note taking. In executive meetings, it may not be proper to take your laptop in so I manually mindmap my notes. This helps reduce risk by my capturing key ideas, responsible parties, and due dates.

On a personal note, I mindmap all the books that I read, my weekly planning, and goal setting. Mind Mapping is my tool of choice in any idea creation process.

The best of all worlds: I Mindmap the books that I read using Mindmanager then I export out to Word format with the Mind Map as a graphic in the beginning of the document and use the outline format in word for the text export. I then use Personal Brain as a Mindmap database to store my documents. This way I can use the search functions within Personal Brain to find a particular mindmap or set of Mindmaps of the topic that I am looking for. I can then have my "Knowledgebase" with me at all times (I store Personal Brain and the Database on a 8 Gig thumbdrive that goes with me everywhere I go).

I'm currently using mind mapping software to plan a stream of new open source development projects for the health care sector. Each mind map is a hive of ideas, competitors products, features and assessments that will help me assess the projects feasibility as well as planning out the work involved in each project.

For recording and organizing ideas, and using the Suggesterator in NovaMind to find ideas that take my thinking in new directions. I find that the ability to reorganize and see the spacial / visual relationships between ideas helps open up new possibilities. Also, I use the technique of adding new blank branches and letting my subconscious work on things, to come up with new ideas. There are some more ideas at http://cli.gs/htAQj1

I am using it in an experiment where we are creating a product for a client that is intended to share information and implications. We have just begun the noodling, but we see that one part of the mind map is going to be used to identify the desired customer experiences, another the product characteristics, and the third part will be the types of information that will feed the product. This should enable us to see the relationships more clearly and identify implications as we move to a prototype.

We use mind maps as part of an Open Innovation process to organize technology scouting projects. Open Innovation and technology scouting are major areas of growth for many consumer product and technology driven companies. Technology scouting involves identifying and evaluating potential solutions to a technology problem. The potential solutions can span numerous fundamental approaches or technology fields and come from a variety of sources. Mind maps are ideal for managing the breadth of possible solutions while at the same time conveying how they relate to the core problem. Mind mapping is a much more intuitive, effiecient, flexible and structrued way to capture and convey the results of a teachnology scouting search than a spreadsheet or written report. We find that a well strucutred mind map, or solution space map as we call them, is often all the client needs to understand where all the possible solutions came from, how they related to one another, and even at times suggest where new unexpected solution might be found. We are now training technology scouts and a major component or our workshop inovles teaching solution space mapping skills.

First I have my innovation method called BVITS which is a systematic way for looking an issue or system, relating it the context or the environment and then apply a set of 10 operators operating on the components of the system and elements in the context across the dimensions of time, space and properties giving rise to many combination of provocative ideas. Please refer to http://www.bvotech.com/BVITS.htm for details of the method.

This method is captured in a mind map template using Freemind and users just fill in the blanks to generate the ideas. The ideas are grouped, prioritized and tracked for implementation all using the mind-map. Email to me if you want the BVITS Freemind template if interested.

I even wrote a generator of ideas using a very powerful visual mappping software called AXON Idea Processor, see http://web.singnet.com.sg/~axon2000/index.htm. The author of the AXON software has included my BVITS generator as a generator demo in his software.

I do a interactive seminar & training workshop called the Art & Science of Light Bulb Moments - it is underpinned by mind maps to get the attendees into a synchronised left & right hemispheric state - http://thebookwright.com/2009/03/19/the-art-scien...

I used a mind map (created in VUE) to work out memory triggers as an aid to people researching and writing their memoirs/life stories. Recalling life memories can be a very beneficial process in combating and treating dementia, and I would appreciate any suggestions on the best mind mapping programme to create mind maps that can be published with interactive features, so that anyone with little or no IT knowhow can simply click on an element in the map and add details of their lives in a simple text editor, or where custom maps can be created for dementia sufferers to trigger the display of visual memory cues, eg family photos, and musical audio cues. Musical memories have been shown to be particularly effective.

For a little over a year now I have been mapping out a comprehensive, end-to-end innovation process with Sequencing, attaching templates and tools, and creating note. I use it as my storyboard in planning an innovation initiative.

I'm using Mind Maps extensively, not just for structuring my thinking but building many of the innovation tools, techniques and processes that I am presently working upon. They collect and show all I need to prompt me. Equally they increasingly are becoming my way to 'talk' to others when I have a complex picture to provide. It still frustrates me on the eventual size when you print them so I have to go back and chop and close, pity there is no faster option to 'right size' my growing documents as they lose the visual appeal when they get to dense.

Firstly, I use Freemind and Mindmanager to capture an Innovative Thinking Methods that I invented from consolidating popular innovative & creative thinking methods. The method is BVITS. Please refer to http://www.bvotech.com/BVITS.htm for the details. The methods starts with capture the components of the systems under study and the elements in the Context of system. With ten operators like segment, minus, combine, outsource, intensify etc applying to the components and elements, and over the dimeniion of time, space and properties, many combination of provocative ideas can be generated.

With the Freemind BVITS template, I just fill in the provocative ideas generated together with the pro and cons of the ideas. The ideas can then be grouped and prioritized for implementation and then tracked for progress. These are done using the mind-map software.

I also use a visual mind mapping software called Axon Idea Processor (http://web.singnet.com.sg/~axon2000/index.htm) to generate the combinations of ideas automatically using the software. It is a fast and objective way to generate ideas.

As an IT journalist, I have used mind maps to map out interviews and to summarise events or conferences by helping to organise the key points. This assists in writing any subsequent story or stories by helping me to focus on the overall picture. The process, reviewing my notes and creating the mind maps, can also help to provide additional insights. I prefer an A3 pad of paper and coloured pens rather than computer-based approaches (I have tried FreeMind, Mind Manager and an evaluation version of Tony Buzan's iMindMap). I file away the completed mind map afterwards for future reference and find that these mind maps are usually able to bring me up to speed on a topic or a company and its activities in less than a minute with the salient points, be this for subsequent interview questions or as background information. I have also tried mind-mapping for taking notes, with varying success... sometimes mind-mapping works very well, although I find that usually I fall back to linear note-taking.

Mindmapping gives Amanaiê a better hands-on visual metaphor approach to intellectual organization, focused on knowledge management, business process management and collaborative innovation, synchronous or not.

At Amanaiê, we use a web-based mindmapping software to transcribe our solution defining brainstorms but also to actually perform the brainstorms collaboratively with people spread in space and time (online collaborative mindmapping)! It's very surprising to see the "currently editing" function and the branches growing!

We also use the web-based mindmapping software to draw knowledge trees (with expansible/retractible view) about relationships between imaginative mindflows, operational workflows, tactic and strategic scenarios and positioning.