It's a well-kept secret that having good ideas, i.e. innovation, also lends itself to structured process; one of the ways to do that is to dissociate the idea-generation phase from the idea-selection phase. Brainstorming is one way to do the first, but if you only brainstorm without a way to do the second, you'll end up nowhere.

There are processes for idea generation other than brainstorming, one that has piqued my curiosity in the past (perhaps in part because of the way its informal name sounds) is the Zwicky box.