Online brainstorming tools can be an effective way to get your team’s ideas out in the open and organized. They offer a number of benefits, including:
-Collaboration: You can work with remote teams, who won’t be interrupted by meetings or stuck in a conference room all day.
-Ease of use: These tools are designed to be intuitive and easy to use, so you can focus on your ideas instead of fumbling with complicated software.
-Cost effectiveness: If you’re working from home or don’t have an office space, these tools are a great way to save money while still being able to access the same technology as larger companies.
Online Brainstorming Tools Free
Brainstorming is how innovation starts, yet coordinating it can require innovation in and of itself. These web-focused brainstorming tools will allow you and your team to put together more ideas and collaborate smoothly, even when you’re miles away. So, how do we get started?
Watch this excellent video by Sprouts, an online organization dedicated to learning, science, and ideation. The video talks about how to leverage brainstorming tools and create the right environment to incite employees to speak up and share their ideas. For example, a brainstorming tool that allows employees to share ideas anonymously and lets them vote between these is one way of helping employees who may otherwise not be comfortable sharing their ideas in public.
Now that you’ve got some ideas on how to get started with your thinking, here are some tools to inspire you.
Google Docs & Google Sheets
Google Docs, of which Google Sheets is a subset, is the modern scratch paper. The free collaborative web-based software makes it simple to upload a document, create a tracking table, and use all the other features with a team, sharing documents with each other and collecting edits.
Slack
Slack is often viewed as a chat app, but its real value lies in its name: Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge. Originally built to develop a video game, Slack’s value is that it keeps your chats, shared documents, and links permanently, so you can just search for the item you need instead of having to ask someone to share it again.
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft has combined features from Slack and Google Docs into Microsoft Teams. The goal of Teams is to put everything you need to finish a project on one platform. It’s most powerful when paired with Microsoft Office, but robust third-party support makes it a useful tool for teams that have downtime at the airport or may only have a phone or tablet with which to work.
Lucidchart
Lucidchart offers a nice solution to help ease the ideation process by allowing users to collaborate in real-time. It not only offers a basic whiteboarding tool for brainstorming, but it also allows users to create more advanced process mapping and systems design.
IdeaBoardz
If you like to organize your ideas in a tangible way, like with pushpins and note cards, IdeaBoardz translates that experience to a browser. It allows members of a group to make virtual sticky notes and place them under chosen categories. A Like button serves as an informal polling mechanism among teams, especially if you’re managing a big group; as likes collect, the more popular ideas stand out.
Coggle
Coggle creates mind maps. Write down a term, begin free-associating, and add each association as a bubble with arrows and connections.
MindMeister
Available on the web and updating in real-time, MindMeister’s virtual whiteboard allows you and your team to collaborate and discuss no matter where you happen to be.
This video reviews Coggle, MindMeister, and Draw.io, three excellent mind-mapping tools, analyzing the benefits and disadvantages of each. Options like Coggle and MindMeister are easier to use, whereas Draw.io gives you a wider variety of options. Which one do you prefer?
Visual Thesaurus
Visual Thesaurus generates association trees from any word you type in. For example, if you type in “car,” it’ll create trees not just for roads, but for train cars, sidecars, and so on. It’s useful for finding the right word to describe a concept, but it can also bridge creative gaps when you’re searching for a metaphor or a different approach. The tool also offers definitions and pronunciations of unfamiliar words, so you’ll learn something along the way.
Bubbl.us
Perfect for freeform structure and design, Bubbl.us lets you layout bubble charts with ease.
MindMup
MindMup is another free mind map maker online. You can easily access your mind maps from anywhere via any device. When you’re done mind-mapping, you can publish and share your mind maps online or present to your colleagues by converting them to PDFs or PowerPoints.
miro brainstorming
From sticky notes to reactions – Miro tools help you go creative and enhance the brainstorming process. Share your ideas, discuss and develop with your team together online.
Miro features for ideation & brainstorming
As soon as you open your first Miro board you get access to various tools that allow you to think in many formats.
Sticky notes
The easiest way to pop down your ideas is sticky notes. Use the bulk mode to create many stickies at once.
Adding sticky notes in bulk
💡 Add Stickies Packs or Brainwriting templates to place a pack of blank stickies on your board.
Assign tags and emojis to sticky notes, change colors, and cluster your stickies. Once you are ready to put your ideas into action, feel free to transform them into tasks by converting your sticky notes into cards or Jira Cards and add them to Miro Kanban – a universal task tracker.
Converting sticky notes into cards
You can even digitize your real-life brainstorming session with Miro: use stickies cap&ture to convert physical sticky notes into editable Miro stickies.
Miro stickies capture
Mind map
Visualize your ideation and brainstorming and develop your ideas with Miro mind map. Add your first node and build branches using intuitive controls and shortcuts: change your map color, align branches, move and reassign nodes.
Miro mind map
Ideation & brainstorming templates
Use special techniques and frameworks to ensure effective individual or team online brainstorming. Miro templates library offers a variety of pre-made templates. Check out the templates on this page or from the template picker right within your board. Open a template preview to see its description.
Ideation & brainstorming templates
💡 Review the list of the most popular ideation & brainstorming techniques that we suggest using in Miro.
Brainstorming & ideation with your team
Miro is a perfect fit for online brainstorming sessions providing a set of collaborative tools designed to make your team meetings more effective.
Timer
Three, two, one… Let’s brainstorm! Sticking to the agenda is a key point of a productive online meeting. Set up the timer and spend several minutes on individual thinking. The timer can be initiated by invited board editors. You will find timer on the top right collaboration toolbar.
Timer in Miro
Voting
Discover the best ideas with the voting tool. Set up a voting session with several clicks: select duration, number of votes per person, and voting area.
Voting in Miro
Reactions
Use reactions to show your emotions here and now while your collaborators present their ideas. Just pick a reaction near your avatar in the top-right corner and it will be displayed for everyone on the board.
Miro reactions
Video conferencing
Miro video chat is an in-built solution allowing you and your team members to feel in one room. To invite your board participants to a video chat session, click the More apps button, then choose Video chat. Be sure to turn on your camera and microphone, then click Start.
Miro video chat
If you use Zoom as a video conferencing solution, try the Miro app for Zoom – the app provides all Miro’s collaboration capabilities within Zoom
💡 Learn how to prepare for an online meeting in Miro.
Conclusion
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