Innovator's Playbook

4BIdea Generation Workshops

In stage 4a, you incubated on your creative briefs and boosted your teams creative confidence. In stage 4b, you will get creative to generate multiple possible solutions for your creative briefs. You’ll then harvest these down and flesh them out into prototyping briefs to take into the experimentation stage.

Your team is all set now for the actual generation of ideas. They have the belief, the right behaviours, are in the right state and space. Now I’ll take you through some approaches for stimulating creative thinking and generating ideas.

Prepare

In preparation for your idea generation session you’ll want to complete the following steps.

1. Involve the right people at the right time

You’ll want to find a multidisciplinary team of idea generators and idea developers. The most innovative organisations in the world, such as Gore, 3M and Unilever, work in cross-functional innovation teams, not silos with handovers between departments. Get your designers and developers involved too. Not only will they have different ideas, but it is also great for buy-in to the ideas that you’ll be asking them to design and build later on.

Avoid any negative people for the ideation steps. You can always bring them in for the judging or stress-testing steps. The same can apply to senior management too, if you think they are going to stop people from thinking really creatively or if they are going to be disruptive by popping in and out. Use people where they fit best ...