Getting down to business: using speedstorming to initiate ceative cross-disciplinary collaboration

Creative collaborations that cross disciplinary boundaries are essential to innovation. Individuals face challenges, however, in forming new collaborations. Empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that the common formats of brainstorming and free-form networking are insufficient for enabling such collaborations to form. We present a potential solution called speedstorming, a pair-wise method of creative interaction similar to the round-robin ‘speed-dating’ technique. Speedstorming combines an explicit purpose, time limits, and one-on-one encounters to create a setting where boundary-spanning opportunities can be recognized, ideas can be explored at a deep level of interdisciplinary expertise, and potential collaborators can be quickly assessed. A comparison of speedstorming and brainstorming suggests that ideas from speedstorming were more technically specialized and that speedstorming participants were more certain in their assessments of the collaborative potential of others. This paper concludes with a discussion of the method's application in a variety of settings.