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I spent two days last week with one of the coolest creativity groups I've ever met, at one of the best creativity events I've been to in a long time.

That's quite a statement, but it's true!

So, here's the dish:

I was in Orlando to participate in an idea-generation workshop with Brainstore, a Swiss Idea Factory.

This company has been on my radar for a while - I found out about them while researching highly creative European companies over a year ago - and when I discovered they were coming to the US to do an IdeaWorkshop, I (most likely) made a horrid fool of myself gushing about why I desperately wanted to be a participant.

But the embarrassment was completely worth it! The IdeaWorkshop was amazingly fun and very productive - in less than 5 hours, we came up with hundreds of ideas.

Some of the things that worked really well:

They kept us moving. During the IdeaWorkshop, we did a ton of different activities ranging from hands-on building to word associations to building off of other peoples' ideas. It was easy to keep thinking of new ideas because so many different parts of our brains were being stimulated.

They made it snappy. The clock was ticking on all the exercises we did, and there wasn't time to censor "bad" ideas. We had to keep it moving, and in the interest of speed, everything was written down.

They made it accessible to everyone. There were so many different activities that even if someone wasn't good at one, they had plenty of chances to demonstrate their abilities in another. (One common problem with focusing too much on a single way of coming up with ideas is that some people might be left out or underutilized. Brainstore successfully avoided that.)

They mixed us up. There were students, external experts and employees from the client's company there - and they didn't let us cling to our comfort zones. We had to go out, mingle, and come up with ideas in a totally different group than we would normally be around. Worked really well because it exposed people to fresh perspectives.

They kept it fun. There was fun scenery, there were fun activities, there were fun questions we had to answer. This was not a dead-serious "we need ideas now" type of event. The energy and the fun level in the room was very high - and I think that was a huge factor in how many ideas were generated.

All in all, it was a fabulous, fabulous time. The amount of creative energy in the room was almost tangible. From what I saw, the participants came away filled with energy, and completely impressed by the many ideas they had come up with.

And the best part is, Brainstore ended up with a ton of ideas to present to their clients.

Hope I get to be a part of their sessions again! It was an amazing creative experience!

If anyone is interested in learning more about them, go to www.brainstore.com (it's in English and German), or read The Idea Machine, a book written by co-founder Nadja Schnetzler about their creativity process.