These brainwriting exercise templates can help your virtual or in person innovation teams succeed.

6-3-5 Brainwriting is a group-structured brainstorming technique that is a highly collaborative way to generate as many ideas as possible in groups within a short period of time. The technique can be used in multiple projects or work cases, such as marketing, design, product/service development, and more. In this article, we’ll explore this technique and provide resources that can help you conduct your own brainwriting exercise, whether it’s virtually or in the same room online.

What is Brainwriting?

One of the biggest advantages of brainwriting exercises is their ability to include all participants in the brainstorming and ideation process. This exercise can either be done in person or online. All you will need is a team of 5-6 people, a facilitator, and your chosen collaborative online tool (or pen and paper for all participants if completed in person).

Typically, brainwriting is completed in several rounds consisting of five minute intervals. During each round, participants are asked to write down three ideas on the topic you’re brainstorming. Once a round is complete, participants will get the next person’s piece of paper and build on the three ideas created by that participant. They can also create three new ideas based on what has already been written down. The process is repeated several times and then the ideas are gathered together. Participants will collaborate to determine which idea(s) are best.

Brainwriting Exercise Templates

If you will be completing a brainwriting exercise virtually with your team, you will want to choose a collaborative, cloud-based software tool that allows you to work together from a distance. A simple Google spreadsheet could work, or you can choose a tool like Miro that offers many templates based around common ideation methods. Here are links to some digital templates for popular whiteboard tools:

Whatever tool you decide to use, make sure it’s easy to access across devices, updating in real time, and provides a fluid way for you to arrange and interact with ideas generated throughout the exercise.

Conclusion

This post covered a brief summary of brainwriting and how it can be used to ideate and innovate with teams. Perhaps you will use the brainwriting template we show above. Miro and Lucidspark are just a few of the many excellent online software tools that can be used to conduct this type of innovation session. For even more resources and templates, check out our previous article on Templates for Brainstorming.

InnovationTraining.org also offers an online brainstorming training course that can be implemented at your organization or business to empower critical and creative thinking. Reach out to us today if you’d like personalized assistance implementing this course into your program.