Here's the beginning of what Baumgartner says about how his ACT method and Brainstorming are different and why ACT is better. It doesn't say so below but he also gave a TED talk.

I developed Anticonventional thinking (ACT) in 2010 as a response to traditional brainstorming, a technique that has been demonstrated to be a poor way of generating creative ideas, yet which has remained the standard in business idea generation simply because it is the way it has always been done. Since first demonstrating ACT at the European Conference for Creativity and Innovation in 2011, I have led workshops in ACT, spoken on ACT, facilitation ACT session to achieve goals and have spoken about ACT globally. Each time I do something with ACT with a group, I learn a little more.

In this article, I compare brainstorming with ACT.


Philosophy

Brainstorming

The operational philosophy behind brainstorming is to generate a large quantity of ideas without worrying about quality, under the assumption that at least a few of the ideas will be creative. The number one rule of brainstorming is that there is to be no criticism of ideas during ideation.

ACT

The operational philosophy behind ACT is to set your mind to reject conventional thinking in favour of unconventional thinking when you need to be creative and to build a single creative vision in response to particular situation. In other words, ACT emphasises creative quality over quantity.

Here's the link to his site. http://www.creativejeffrey.com/creative ... ?topic=act

Critical thinking leads to creativity, seems to be the essence....

Don't it though? Criticizing the ideas but not the person leads to higher quality ideas. Another thing on a different website [but this guy also talks about it] is that although you don't want a lot of low quality ideas in the beginning that you won't take action on, after you've taken action go ahead and generate another high quality idea so innovation doesn't stop there but continues incrementally into the future. It's how Emmett "invented" the stick as if invention was something that stops after the prototype...NOT.

I have always struggled to think "inside the box". Is it just me, or does anyone else have this as an issue?

Maybe I read too much Feynman as a child.

Lately, I'm more interested in thinking inside the tesseract.