Page 165 - 100 Great Business Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

At the i'iut ot this session each group organizes its cards by theme and
ailliotilices the ideas to the rest of the group. All ideas are written on a

large surface by a leader or recorder.
6. Participants are formed into groups of ten and all the ideas on the writ-

ing surface are brainstormed, one idea at a time.

87/23. NOMINAL GROUP TECHNIQUE
The nominal group technique (NGT) is a structured small-
group process for generating ideas. 4 It can be used to di-
minish the impact of a dominant person on the outcome of
the group's idea generation process, whether the source of
the dominance is formal authority or individual personality.
The nominal group technique accomplishes this objective
through a process that limits an individual's inputs to brief
explanations and uses a secret ballot to choose among
brainstormed ideas. For this technique to be effective, the
participants must agree that the group's decision is binding.
"As a group decision-making process, the nominal group
technique is most useful for (1) identifying the critical vari-
ables in a specific problem situation; (2) identifying key ele-
ments of a program designed to implement a particular so-
lution to some problems; or (3) establishing priorities with
regard to problems to be addressed, goals to be attained,

desirable end states and so
on. In all of these circum-

stances, it often seems
beneficial to aggregate
individual judgments
into group decisions.
However, NGT is not

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