Tips to Introduce Ideation into Your Company or Daily Life
To survive and thrive in today's rapidly ever-changing playing field, businesses need to innovate. Innovation is the key to staying on top of your business, competitors, customer needs and expectations.
But innovation is difficult. It requires you to think outside the box and be future-oriented rather than focused on the current state of a business. You will also need an open business mindset and willingness to adapt your entire ecosystem.
To truly thrive at innovation, it's essential to create a safe space for ideation, where ideation is the creative process of generating, developing and communicating new ideas. This safe space should also be accessible to all of your stakeholders (employees, customers, etc.) as everyone has the capacity to come up with new ideas. It isn't about being creative – creativity is an innate skill that everyone has – it's about being able to freely express what you think, regardless of position in a company.
Approaching new idea generation
In design thinking, and especially with new idea generation, it's important to start with quantity over quality. A thousand ideas at your disposal makes it easier to filter them so only the best ones remain. If you only have 5 ideas then it's impossible to know if those are the best ones your team could come up with. Quality is also superfluous at this point as the most successful products or services often came from ideas that the majority considered to be ridiculous.
Find a routine that works for you and your company. Never break the routine once creative sessions become a habit and regular mindset because creative muscles need constant training. On the other hand, beware of overdoing things as you risk the pitfall of spending too much time on idea generation and never bringing the best ones to reality.
Five tips to implementing ideation
- Start the day by writing down 3 simple new ideas that can be implemented within a month. This is fast and easy to do, with the added benefit of creating routine. Don't worry if the ideas are average, you will start to acquire quite a lot of useful ideas after a month or two.
- Talk to your users or customers. Engaging users in your product or service creates a sense of community. It also gives you access to the real knowledge of what they want or expect.
- Look at other industries. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, look at what others have done before you. Consider biomimicry, an approach that successfully translates inspiration from elements and systems in nature to solve complex human problems. It took millions of years for nature to figure out what works best, so why not learn from nature and make use of solutions that are already tried and true?
- Role play. Role playing reduces barriers to the end user. Adopting their behaviour allows you to feel and experience what their life is like so you can find pains and empathise with issues they face.
- Use design thinking techniques. There are several techniques in design thinking to aid brainstorming and the generation of new ideas. A few of these include brainwriting, SCAMPER, Cialdini's triggers, sketching, HMWs (How Might We), and more. This is our bread and butter at The Product Architects (TPA) and we would love to take you on a journey through these techniques.
Ideation is for everyone, no matter what your core business is. Creativity as a daily driver will help you to solve future problems: ideating regularly not only trains your creativity and drives innovation, but prepares you for the long run with many useful ideas at your fingertips to implement when necessary. The beauty of it all is that you can begin generating new ideas right away without help, as long as you use the right technique. As specialists in strategic product design and design thinking, TPA is ready to support and guide you so that you're always using the right techniques to find solutions for the right problem.
