When I hear the word "brainstorm," my free-association is "tempest in a teapot." To me, "brainstorming" is corporatespeak for a widely familiar, disheartening situation. A group of people gathers in a conference room to conjure uncharacteristic mental powers by magic. In a reckless sacrifice, they burn the meeting agenda. They wipe down the whiteboard. They align themselves around a table and await the visitation of divine creative force. Words flow, winds stir...

Creative problem-solving, cousin to brainstorming

But nothing of substance is shaken free from the bindweed of hierarchy and corporate oneupsmanship, the sterility of the room to eye and mind, the burden of respectful consensus. "Brainstorming" is cousin to "thinking outside the box"—another aspiration of boxed-in cubicle dwellers. And it's handmaiden to "innovation," the process by which a company or nation undergoes wholesale transformation.

It's all well and good for me to rail against clichés. So where do Promethean sparks of imagination come from—at least in my small world of computer-science research?

One colleague tells me that she can only think in contact with water. Her muse sings in the shower. Another can only think with his shoes off. (Perhaps his habit ensures that he's surrounded only by devoted colleagues.) I myself think better amid the impersonal noise of a café, with the pressure to seal my mind off, than around comfortable and familiar distractions.

I've seen the best ideas flutter down at unpredictable times. One of RSA Labs' best known papers [1] began with a colleague's joke. We were discussing rumored plans by the European Union to embed microchips in Euro banknotes. "Wouldn't it be funny," this colleague quipped, "if Switzerland put chips in its banknotes that jammed Euros?" We figured out how to make this mischief work—and voila! A new privacy-enhancing chip design emerged.

Usually inventive ideas are like cats. They only come unbidden. For instance, there's the famous story about Kekulé's discovery [2] of the atomic structure of benzene. A vision came to him spontaneously of snakes forming a circle by biting one another's tails, revealing the molecule's ring-like structure.

The predictive power of crowds and markets over lone individuals is well documented [3]. Groups filter outliers: A boon for forecasting, but a bane for invention. I recently attended an event in which two groups "brainstormed" independently. Instead of doubling creative power, the presence of two groups halved it. Each group drew up a list of ideas. They decided that the valuable ore lay at the intersection of their lists. One person sensibly urged them to throw away precisely this fool's gold—the ideas that were clearly in the air and therefore stale—and keep the outliers instead. But he was an outlier. They threw away his advice.

In my novel Tetraktys [4], the NSA (National Security Agency) has the boldness to bring in a strange young man—Ambrose Jerusalem, the hero of the novel—to tackle a knotty problem, the exposure of an elusive cult. The agency's masterstroke is the recognition that it needs not a meeting of minds, not groupthink, but eccentricity.

In the midst of an economic recession in which governments, companies, and the media are all trumpeting invention and innovation as economic lifesavers, where should they turn? There are no formulas or sage pronouncements. Sometimes invention is a joke. Sometimes it's an unbidden vision. It's generally undemocratic (strangely, not unlike a corporation). If there's a universal rule, as best I can gather, it's that invention shuns crowds. And another: If a spark descends from the heavens, the word "brainstorm" will almost certainly blow it out.