Generating Ideas

The first action of the second day is a wrap-up of the first day.

As next, the participants should give a one sentence pulse check.

To have a perfectly motivated up group, play a short warm-up game.

Ideation is about brainstorming ideas.

At this point the team starts to imagine possibilities.

The goal is to generate as many ideas as possible.

Do not check for feasibility and viability at the beginning of ideation, this is done later during prioritization.

Brainstorming techniques are very typical for this phase.

At the end of this phase, one or several ideas have to be identified, which should be realized and validated as (low-fi) prototypes.

Typically prioritization of ideas is done, by considering also the business viability and the technical feasibility of ideas.

Consider brainstorming rules!

Sheldon Allan "Shell" Silverstein, was an American poet, singer-songwriter, musician, composer, cartoonist, screenwriter and author of children's books. He styled himself as Uncle Shelby in his children's books.

Ideation is about "Creating Choices" whereas judging ideas would limit the solution space. Even a crazy idea might lead to something meaningful when people start to build their own ideas on the ones of others.

Judging ideas is done later during the prototyping phase together with the potential users.

Franklin P. Jones (1908 - 1980) was a Philadelphia reporter, public relations executive and humorist. He wrote quips and quotes that entertained readers of major publications for years. Mr. Jones was known nationally during the 1940s and 50s for his column "Put it this Way" in the Saturday Evening Post. "Put it this Way" set a record as the longest continuously published feature in the Saturday Evening Post. He was an accomplished "paragrapher" - a writer who condenses humorous or thought provoking ideas into paragraph form. His quips and quotes were published (often anonymously) in numerous publications, including Reader's Digest, the Wall Street Journal, Changing Times and Quote magazine.

Image sources:

Left: Werner Reiterer, Anfänge der Raumfahrt (hardcore version), 2004, Denise and Günther Leising collection, Graz exhibition.

Right: Brazilian artist Rodrigo Pereirastransformed boring old cement eyesores into adorable reminders of oh-so-fun toys.

Some ideas sound weird at a first glance. But sometimes those ideas unveil as the most powerful ones at a later point in time.

At the beginning of ideation, the team should have an divergent state of mind. At this point in time, ideas are not expensive. It is better to skip many ideas at a later point in time, than to miss one silver bullet. Missing a silver bullet can be extremely expensive!

Linus Carl Pauling was an American chemist, biochemist, peace activist, author, and educator. He was one of the most influential chemists in history and ranks among the most important scientists of the 20th century.

John Calvin Coolidge, Jr. was the 30th President of the United States. A Republican lawyer from Vermont, Coolidge worked his way up the ladder of Massachusetts state politics, eventually becoming governor of that state.

Like the horse in the figure above, people tend to "suffer" fixedness.

Fixedness is a state of mind in which an object or situation is perceived in one specific way, to the exclusion of any alternative.

Fixedness often prevents us from thinking of alternative solutions to problems, for example: functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used.

The price: Inability to imagine new possibilities and innovative solutions.

Background Story: Candle Box challenge by Karl Duncker

In a classic experiment demonstrating functional fixedness, Duncker (1945) gave participants a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and a book of matches.

The participants are asked to attach the candle to the wall using these material only.

Most people try to pin the candle directly with the thumbtacks to the wall.

The solution: Use the empty tack box as a container/platform for the candle and then use the thumbtacks to pin the box with the candle standing inside to the wall.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_fixedness

Functional fixedness is the tendency to relate to components in a system specific functions only and no other functions.

It is like "a mental block against using an object in a new way that is required to solve a problem".

In innovation thinking it is key to continuously overcome this functional fixedness.

Overcoming functional fixedness makes it possible to find creative solutions within the "closed world" of an existing solution.

Structural Fixedness is the tendency to relate to a system in specific structure without changing its structure.

For a process we have the tendency to relate to it as a specific sequence of steps.

For example the hotel check-in process: It is hard to think about changing this process, but tools and exercise force us to rethink existing processes.

Another example: the airline check-in process has been re-thought completely multiple times.

Subtraction is a tool that means removing an essential component from a product/service and Subtraction is a tool that means removing an essential component from a product/service and finding new usages for the product.

Naturally, We tend to think that the best way to innovate is to add new features to our products or services.

What can we add that increases the appeal of our offering?

This route can easily lead to extra cost, feature overload and customer fatigue.

Sometimes a better answer lies in subtraction.

Sometimes you can get the customer to do something that you do right now. The supermarket was a remarkable innovation in the 1920s. The key new idea was to get the customer to serve themselves rather than having an assistant serve them. A modern updating of the idea is provided by IKEA. Not only do customers act as assemblers in putting the furniture together, they also act as store men in collecting the flat packs from the warehouse.

The Supermarket and IKEA did not add new features, the opposite they removed components, the assemblers, the warehouse staff.

Besides classical brainstorming, there are many other techniques, which can be utilized for idea generation.

One technique is called "Remember the future".

This technique works as classical brain storming, but it inspires the design team by setting them into a context, which drives creativity.

If the design challenge is the identification of new use cases for a given technology, then the following example is very useful for ideation:

• Layout a "day in the live" of your persona.
• Brainstorm for each of the daily steps, whether and how the technology could improve this step.

This structured technique is also called "Multiplication".

Examples for unstructured ideation techniques are the classical brain storming or the "remember the future" technique.

A similar technique, like the "day in the life", is the so called Customer Journey Map.

The Customer Journey Map is a tool to explore the journey an end-user goes through in the context of a particular business scenario.

Please note that a Customer Journey Map is not just a process description.

The journey map supports you in finding the human meaning of solutions by uncovering unknown pain points and needs.

A journey map workshop often creates a safe environment that enables people to have conversations with each other they hadn't had before and explore choices they didn't know where possible.

A Customer Journey Map can not only be used to synthesize pain points and needs. It is also a very powerful ideation technique.

Another quite famous example is the "Blue Ocean" metaphor/strategy.

This technique gets especially used in the context of business model innovation.

Whereas brainstorming is an unstructured technique for ideation, the Blue Ocean REICC technique is a structured technique to derive ideas.

Blue oceans metaphor: Denotes all the industries not in existence today-the unknown market space, untainted by competition. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. Many rapid and profitable opportunities for growth are available, away from the "value-cost" trade-off. Instead of dividing up existing and often shrinking demand and benchmarking.

A business model canvas represents a business model or business case with nine simple building blocks, including customer segments, channels, relationships, value proposition, key activities, resources, partners, cost structure, and revenue streams.

The canvas therefore combines the economical viability of a solution with its desirability and feasibility.

It can be used for ideation of new/adapted business models or any other challenge related to entities with a business like working model.

The canvas is also extremely helpful to identify business opportunities driven by new technologies, for example, "What does Big Data mean for my business?"

Source: http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/canvas

After going "wild" within ideation (for example, by brainstorming), it is important to cluster ideas and prioritize them.

This can be done by considering given constraints (for example: business viability or technological feasibility) and design principles (for example, the solution has to run on a certain technology).

Even so, this is a convergent exercise, which eliminates ideas, it is important to mention, that introduction of constraints as a design principle can also be a very powerful tool to foster creativity and overcome fixedness of people.

For example: Design a chair with no legs or design a bicycle without wheels.

Prioritized ideas set the scope for a later low fidelity prototype. Hence not all ideas can go into the prototyping phase.

Background stories to the pictures:

• MacGyver is a very famous US TV Serial about a private detective, who never uses weapons to get out of critical situations. Instead he is using simple materials (whatever is around there) to build amazing problem fixes.

• Gene Roddenberry the creator of "Star Trek" had to invent a new transport mechanism for persons (to beam), as the budget for his Sci-Fi serial did not allow expensive landing and starting simulations of the spacecraft "Enterprise".

One pragmatic approach to prioritize ideas is budget spending with virtual money.

Just tell the participants to create some virtual money with sticky notes (each participant same amount of money).

Ask them to spend the money on the ideas in a way, as it would be real money belonging to them.

Another way of idea prioritization is the clustering of ideas according to their viability and feasibility.

Ideas with high feasibility/viability should run into prototyping.