Breakthrough thinking from inside the box.

Companies often begin their search for great ideas either by encouraging wild, outside-the-box thinking or by conducting quantitative analysis of existing market and financial data and customer opinions. Those approaches can produce middling ideas at best, say Coyne, founder of an executive-counseling firm in Atlanta, and Clifford and Dye, strategy experts at McKinsey. The problem with the first method is that few people are very good at unstructured, abstract brainstorming.