# Executive Summary

This comprehensive research identifies **30+ distinct brainstorming prompt patterns** documented with exact wording, templates, and output format specifications that practitioners report using successfully for idea generation. Evidence comes from prompt engineering communities, marketing professionals, product managers, QA teams, and innovation consultants across multiple platforms (ITONICS, Medium, PromptHub, Zapier, LinkedIn, GitHub).

**Key Findings:**

1. **Prompt patterns are highly transferable across domains** - a pattern used for marketing content ideation works equally well for product feature generation and creative writing
2. **Successful patterns share common structural elements** - role definition, constraint specification, output format, and reasoning requirements
3. **Output format specifications are critical** - prompts specifying "numbered list," "table," or "with justification for each" consistently outperform open-ended versions
4. **Constraint-based patterns generate more creative solutions** - paradoxically, adding limitations (budget, time, features) produces more innovative ideas than open-ended requests
5. **Practitioners combine patterns sequentially** - advanced users layer multiple patterns (e.g., persona + constraint + output format) to achieve superior results

**Recommended Starting Points:**

- For rapid quantity: Perspective Multiplication patterns (8-15 ideas)
- For quality/depth: Multi-stage refinement patterns with constraint variation
- For breakthrough innovation: Inversion + Extreme Scaling combinations
- For practical implementation: Constraint-Based patterns with specific resource limitations
