Benefits of virtual brainstorming tools
With teams no longer confined to the four walls of a meeting room, why limit brainstorming with markers and whiteboards? After all, two-thirds of decision-makers say a distributed remote workforce will be more common in the future than teams working from the same location, according to a remote work study.
Consider this: Your marketing team, scattered across time zones, needs to brainstorm a new campaign. With the help of virtual brainstorming tools, collaboration becomes seamless. Whether you prefer to work together in real time or asynchronously, you no longer have to deal with the distributed workforce challenges of conflicting schedules and time zone differences. You can sip your morning coffee in New York, while your colleague catches the sunset in Tokyo.
What are virtual brainstorming tools?
Virtual brainstorming tools are digital solutions that facilitate collaborative idea generation, discussions, and problem-solving among your team members, regardless of their physical locations.
Let’s see how different virtual brainstorming tools serve your collaboration needs.
| Brainstorming solution | Description | Example | Use cases |
| Digital whiteboarding | Provide a virtual canvas where you can draw, write, and collaborate in real time | Box Canvas | Brainstorming, mind mapping, project planning |
| Video conferencing platforms | Combine video conferencing with collaborative features such as chat and document sharing | Zoom, Agora, Cisco, Webex | Team meetings, virtual workshops |
| Note-taking tools | Help your team create, edit, and share notes in real time, saving notes in the cloud | Box Notes | Collaborative writing, document editing, and project management |
| Project management tools | Helpful after the session for assigning tasks and sharing timelines | Asana, Trello, Monday | Project planning, task management, team collaboration |
| AI tools | Analyze your existing enterprise data so you can easily categorize and find relevant information during brainstorming sessions | Box AI | Generating creative content, extracting insights and fetching information |
How virtual brainstorming software helps your team
While traditional face-to-face brainstorms are valuable, these sessions pose challenges — like limited attendance and uneven participation — which can impact decision quality. Here’s how online brainstorming tools help you overcome these challenges.
1. Distributed team collaboration
A Box-sponsored IDC survey found that difficulty communicating and collaborating with colleagues hinders productivity for 38% of employees. Online brainstorming sessions let your team collaborate from anywhere, regardless of location or time zone.
For instance, when a globally located finance team creates the annual budget, they might use a virtual whiteboard to contribute insights, share financial projections, and discuss budget allocations. This approach ensures that everyone’s input is considered, fostering an inclusive environment and boosting productivity.
2. Enhanced flexibility
While synchronous sessions allow your team to collaborate in real time, virtual brainstorming tools also support asynchronous collaboration. The latter approach allows your hybrid team to contribute ideas at their convenience, minimizing the challenges associated with coordinating schedules.
Asynchronous flexibility also provides an extended period for idea generation. Your team has the freedom to reflect on topics, conduct research, and contribute well-thought-out ideas over a more extended timeframe.
3. Protection from groupthink
In traditional brainstorming sessions, you might’ve observed groupthink — also known as a compulsion to conform to dominant ideas or opinions. This situation leads to a lack of diverse perspectives. Using online whiteboards allows your team members to generate ideas in parallel, each contributing to the shared canvas in an equitable way.
Parallel idea generation ensures a diverse pool of thoughts, reducing the likelihood of everyone piggybacking onto the first few suggestions and neglecting alternative, potentially innovative solutions.
4. Equal share of voice
For 51% of workers, a top concern of hybrid work is not feeling seen and heard in meetings as a remote participant.
Virtual brainstorming provides a level playing field to evaluate ideas based on merit rather than the identity of the contributor. For example, you can empower team members who feel uncomfortable speaking up to clearly communicate thoughts using a chat feature, leading to a diverse range of perspectives.
5. Recording and documentation
You can easily record virtual brainstorming sessions to revisit discussions and ideas at a later date and time. This feature is beneficial for clarifying details, tracking progress, and ensuring that no valuable insights are lost.
A Box-sponsored IDC whitepaper found that 96% of the organizations with siloed unstructured data face challenges in finding the resources they need. With a virtual brainstorming tool, you eliminate organizational silos by centrally storing notes, whiteboards, voice memos, video calls, comments, annotations, and more.
Your human resources (HR) team can also use these records to onboard new team members or train employees. New hires can familiarize themselves with the team’s thought processes, decision-making approaches, and historical context by reviewing past brainstorming sessions.
6. Identification of next steps
The best online brainstorming tools include features for organizing and categorizing ideas, making it easier for you to identify actionable items and create a roadmap for implementation.
By providing a structured framework, these solutions help your team to transition seamlessly from ideation to execution, ensuring that the creative insights generated during the brainstorming session are translated into tangible actions and outcomes. This process helps teams maintain momentum and effectively turn innovative ideas into reality.
Enable online brainstorming sessions with Box
Box makes your online brainstorming sessions collaborative, dynamic, and secure. Box Canvas offers endless, infinite virtual whiteboards where your team illustrates concepts, sketches out ideas, and creates mind maps.
The easy-to-use features of our virtual brainstorming tool ensure inclusive collaboration for everyone to contribute through chat, sticky notes, voting, and more. And you can also integrate Box Canvas with project management platforms like Asana or Trello to transfer action items and ideas into actionable tasks.
The interconnected and secure ecosystem of the Content Cloud improves collaboration, increases productivity, and ensures that brainstorming outcomes translate into actionable steps.
Contact us to bring your next big idea to life.
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