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MASTER IDEATION
1 START YOUR (CREATIVE) ENGINES
Generating lots of ideas with a team is easy if you know how to do it. It all comes down to facilitation. This entails employing the right set of tools in the right atmosphere (space) with a creative mindset focused on accomplishing this one task. It’s also crucial to set a time limit for your ideation session. It would be counterproductive to generate ideas all day. Set a time bound and create within that space. And when you believe you’ve run out of gas, reshuffle the ideas in front of you and build off of them.
2 BUILD STEPPING-STONES
The more ideas you and your team put out there, the more chances you’ll have to make interesting connections and build ideas on top of other ideas. Moreover, just like when you build a path to the future, the shape of the stepping-stones is not as important as their number and arrangement.
3 CREATE A RITUAL
It takes a bit of time even for an experienced creative to shift mental gears and get the creative juices flowing. Consider creating some kind of ideation ritual, like a fire starter (discussed later in this chapter on page 144). With practice, you’ll learn how much time you need to get in the zone. Most important, plan for that time to be uninterrupted.
4 USE A TOOL
Don’t think you have to conquer the idea frontier all by yourself using only brainstorming techniques. There are lots of ideation tools, like the Business Model Canvas and Creative Matrix, that can help you and your team create many valuable ideas. Using tools for ideating enables you to frame the session while simultaneously expanding on and exploring new ideas. For example, the Business Model Canvas provides a framework for digging deeper into each idea.
TIP! HOW TO BUILD MORE STEPPING-STONES
RANDOMIZE
Use a dictionary to blindly pick random words. Once you have 10–20 words, try to make combinations. Those will lead to new associations and new ideas.
ANALOGY
Look for an analogous situation. How does your idea or problem translate to a mobile phone? Horse racing? Look at objects around you for inspiration.
COMBINE
Take your idea and combine it with another one that seems unrelated. Or, apply it to an object you see on your desk, or a person, or an activity. What does that look like?
MAKE IT EXTREME
What is the most extreme version of your idea you can come up with? Can you blow it up? What if everyone uses it? What is the opposite of your idea?
“ANIMALIZE” IT
If your idea was an animal, what would it be? What are its characteristics? Would it bite? Would you be able to domesticate it? What if it were a car? Or a person?
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5 GO DEEP
It is one thing to generate, share, and expand upon lots of ideas. But you’ll also need to explore some of those ideas in more depth – especially when it comes to selecting a few ideas to prototype and validate. What is the core of each idea? What and whose problems does it aim to solve? What will customers pay for and how will they find it in the first place?
You will not be able to explore every idea this deeply. But for some ideas, digging into their context and unpacking the assumptions you and your team have made when generating them is extremely valuable. 
FREE UP SPACE FOR DEEPER THINKING
Developing new ideas is central to design and business, but it’s easy to forget that a big part of ideation is “editing.” During the ideation process, it’s vital to get as many ideas as possible out of your head and onto paper, whether through words or images – or both.
Oftentimes we fear that some of our ideas might be silly or embarrassing. But that doesn’t matter. Getting those first ideas out of your mind helps free up space for deeper thinking. Our first ideas may actually end up being the most appropriate, but we need to explore as many options as possible before we can assess this accurately. The more ideas we can develop, the better chance we have to select the best option. And it is crucial to allow yourself to dump an idea at the eleventh hour in favor of a better one.
Remember that ideas can come from anywhere – and that ego needs to be removed. The ideation process is most impactful when there are a number of people involved at the same time. That way we can build on the ideas of others.
Kevin Finn
Creative Director TheSumOf
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STORIES OF IDEATION
FROM 1…TO 10
As part of our Health & Wellness initiative, we were working on several prototypes for our initial concepts. We had gathered great insights from in-person and market research. What we needed, however, was a matching business model strategy.
As an electronics manufacturer, it was clear to us that we could offer a product for sale. But we were also interested in understanding how we might offer value-adds, such as online services.
As a team, we gathered in our innovation room for a couple of days to generate new ideas. We quickly mapped out our idea for this new product onto a Business Model Canvas – then used that as the basis for 300+ more ideas! We clustered these ideas into 10 different business model options that we then explored and designed.
Using this approach enabled us to quickly create new options. It also provided a framework for us to analyze our underlying assumptions. We applied a customer-centric approach to this framework in order to validate different business model alternatives.
This fresh approach to ideation revitalized our innovation efforts. We continue to use these tools as part of our process.
// Gabriel Rubinsky, Senior Manager, New Product Innovation, at Panasonic
JUST SAY NO TO DRUGS
A group from a large pharmaceutical company used the Business Model Canvas in an ideation exercise. The group was asked to identify the one thing they knew for certain about their business — selling drugs — and remove it from the canvas.
Indignantly, the CEO responded: “You obviously don’t understand our business. 100% of our revenue comes from selling drugs!”
Nevertheless, we asked them to spend 30 minutes on this “ridiculous” scenario, just to see what they could come up with.
Adding this constraint made them look at their business in a whole new light! The team found that the company actually had an incredibly valuable (key) resource it had never considered as a potential source of revenue: its knowledge of cancer treatments.
DON’T MAKE LISTS WHEN IDEATING AS A TEAM, AS THIS SEEMS TO LIMIT PEOPLE’S ABILITY TO COME UP WITH MORE THAN SEVEN IDEAS. THIS MAY BE A RESULT OF THE URGE TO BE CONSISTENT OR COMPLETE. INSTEAD, MAKE AN UNORGANIZED PILE OF STICKY NOTES FIRST!
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IMPROVING THE LIVES OF MILLIONS
I was running an ideation session with representatives from our clinical, technology, marketing, and sustainability functions. We sketched out a long list of ideas and then thought about how to filter them. I wanted just one criterion: it had to improve the lives of over 10 million people in the developing world. By the end of the day, we were looking at a handful of best-guess business models that had the possibility of not only achieving commercial success but of transforming lives. I remember being genuinely moved. Fast forward three years: that same guy from sustainability is exploring how to evolve these models in the market – but this time he has over 100 million people in his sights.
// Alex Davidge, Head of Business Architecture and Strategy Development, Bupa
MAKING IT SAFE TO SPEAK
A traditional financial services firm held a two-day offsite with its top 60 executives to discuss disruptive ideas for growth. Because the firm’s culture emphasized detail orientation and risk mitigation, the participants were unaccustomed to sharing wild ideas in an open format.
To help the participants become more comfortable, the facilitator created custom “Safe to Speak” playing cards with clearly identified behaviors that supported provocative questioning and candid feedback. This encouraged participants to reward one another for modeling more open and inquiry-based behaviors.
The cards not only stimulated exciting new ideas, but the participants had more fun and got a chance to see their colleagues’ creative sides.
HOW TOYOTA FINANCIAL SERVICES SPURRED CREATIVE GENIUS IN THEIR MIDST
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CASE STUDY TOYOTA
TOYOTA FINANCIAL SERVICES & THE BIG IDEAS
In 2012, the Toyota Financial Services (TFS) group, the financial subsidiary of the Toyota Motor Corporation, was under a lot of pressure. Toyota had experienced a substantial number of automotive recalls, and the external business environment was transforming. The CEO, George Borst, knew he needed to transform his business along with the environment.
RAISING THE STAKES
To raise the stakes and create a shared sense of urgency, Borst wanted to set the bar almost impossibly high for his executive team. He was going to ask them to double the company’s profits in five years without increasing spending. And, he was going to do it at an offsite, using new and unfamiliar ways to innovate.
In the past, many smart people at TFS had tried to implement a future focus. But when they tried to come up with new disruptive opportunities, they consistently were foiled by their traditional tools and practices. As one person put it, “There was a curse of knowledge, with plans on top of plans, spreadsheets on top of spreadsheets, metrics on top of metrics, and scorecards on top of scorecards. Lots of business plans everywhere, and everything had to come from a trend report.” The executive team knew that traditional methods of innovation wouldn’t be enough to move the company toward its future goal. To bring in new tools and techniques, TFS organized an offsite.