New Ideas for Growth

I love walking into my office and hearing the conversation of brainstorming employees. It means ideas and energy are flowing and innovation is at work. That’s why I really liked this story I came across in BusinessWeek.

Last year, Best Buy picked four groups of salespeople in their early 20s and 30s and asked the strangers to room together for 10 weeks in an L.A. apartment complex. They were to come up with business ideas that Best Buy could roll out quickly and cheaply. The result: A service called Best Buy Studio, which provides Web-design consulting for small businesses.

It’s the Real World of business-extreme brainstorming. As participant Jermey Sevush says, “Living together and knowing we only had 10 weeks sped up our team-building process. We voluntarily worked longer hours, talking about business models while making spaghetti.”

Other companies have caught on. Whirlpool sends eight sales reps to Benton Harbor, Michigan, to test out products in a program called Real Whirled. The more experience each rep has with the products, the better marketers they become.

I wonder -- how could this idea be applied to Pharma branding and connecting with the patient and their experiences?