Brainstorming is one of those things which some people believe is natural and easy - they are wrong! There are 7 things which will make your team brainstorm go brilliantly .... and 6 things which will absolutely kill it. Find out what they are here.

I am looking forward to speaking and running a workshop on High Performing Teams at ECCIXII - the 12th European Conference on Innovation and Creativity in Portugal (Faro) from September 14-17.

Thanks to mollfrey for posting my presentation on VENs at Connecting Innovation in Brighton (UK) on myplick.com. I like the way the slides are automatically previewed in flash with the text transcript also shown. Nice one!

What is the best way to introduce bioteaming into any organization or network? I recommend an Experiential Learning approach which allows you to evolve your own unique take on bioteaming which takes full advantage of the hidden learning and experiences you and your organization already have about 'natural teams'.

Alexander Kandybin, of Booz & Company, suggests consumer products companies need to look to the power of natural selection to break out of the incremental innovation trap.

Nature has a way of automatically right-sizing a group to tackle the job at hand. Just like the Russian Matryoshka Dolls (dolls within dolls), small groups link into bigger ones, which in turn link into still bigger ones. In this follow-up article to Why penguins have no commanding officer and Did ants invent the perfect system for communicating via mobile technology?, Ken Thompson writing for NESTA explores what we can learn about teamwork and group/community size from nature's most successful teams.