Develop ideas

Develop ideas

The starting point for idea generation is a shared understanding of what the customer perceives to be a problem. When you generate ideas, you will quickly come up with a number of suggestions for ways in which to solve the problem. The aim is  to help you question the obvious and challenge the established. Some of the ideas will be potential solutions, while others will quickly be discarded. During the actual idea generation process, you should allow yourself to think outside the box – and adopt a broad-minded approach to the contributions of others.

In order for you to get going quickly using good tools, we have produced a method card. Invite colleagues to workshops and get cracking!

Some basic rules to follow during idea generation:

There are no bad ideas

The key to a good idea generation process is that everyone in the team feels comfortable contributing their ideas. No negative thoughts or judgmental behaviour is allowed! You may well be tempted to take a critical approach: “this can’t work”, “we’ve tried this before”, etc. Popular commercial concepts have been developed by combining and sharing mediocre ideas and turning them into meaningful ones.

Encourage interaction

The best solutions are developed using both individual and group idea generation. When you start an idea generation process as a team, the loudest voices in the room will set the terms, which will naturally limit the ideas’ perspectives. Psychological safety is a hugely important principle for the team, but it can nevertheless be worth starting with individual idea generation. The outcome is often much better when everyone in the team has the opportunity to suggest ideas on ways to solve the problem. Draw on everyone’s suggestions!

Quantity over quality

Opt for quantity and worry about quality later. If you get caught up on quality during idea generation, you also limit your own creativity.

In this video, Tim Brown talks about experimenting to learn – something to remember during this phase: