A quick recap of what happened today:

Based on own survey, mintel reports and own ideas we defined 4 quesitons or areas for research

1-How technology could diminish loneliness in a trip?

2- Giving some ideas of new ways to use the digital camera in a trip?

3- Invent a new traveler ice-breaker system

4- New ways of communication in a foreign language environment.
The ideation stage of the brainstorming process was conducted on meebo.coms chat room.

• We generated ideas for questions 1 and 2
• The transcript is printed and needs to be evaluated tomorrow.
• The main problem we faced was lack of participators. This is a big issue with online brainstorming as the size of the group is critical to the success of the process. This is good learning. I dont think we should give up on the online brainstorm. We need a new strategy for recruiting participators.
• We have proved that getting people to join a chat doesnt work. We have also proved that brining the brainstorm to a room doesnt also work.
• My thought is that we need a dedicated online travel community, like couch-surfers or lonely planet to be engaged with our project. Im going to do a quick scan of existing communities now.
• Its been suggested that we could go to a hostel and do a face to face brainstorm. This could be a plan B for tomorrow however its very risky and time consuming.

Tomorrow we will evaluate the results and conduct two 30min brainstorm face to face with just the 5 degrees team. After gathering the results we will evaluate them and if we need more ideas, we will try the online brain storm again but with at least 5 other player apart from us.

Please leave further comments/obsrevations, if you have any

Lets keep rocking!

On the whole, todays session was a great success.

• The formality and structure of the brainstorm (20min Ideation // 15 min Evalutaion) proved to be a good strategy for generating large quanitites of ideas in a short period of time.
• Strict time keeping and chairman oversight of the process has been crucial to the success, especially the emphasis on the non-evaluation during ideation and on reformulating the problem to generate new perspectives.
• 30 min ideation proved to be too long, 20 min is the optimum time for this phase.
• Standing instead of siting was useful in re-invigorating participants
• Cross stimulation of ideas during Ideation was a weak.However, this did not have a great impact on the total result.

Tomorrow morning we will evaluate and develop the final ideas. We will have to narrow them down to 2 ideas which we will test during the afternoon.

Evaluation will be done by analysis in terms of implementation, originality and usefulness. More ideation might be necessary to develop some ideas.

Great work guys! we rocked!