Ideation is the creative process of generating and refining ideas. Whether applied in business, design, or problem-solving, its goal is to produce innovative solutions. Ready to elevate your idea game? Here are five powerful ideation techniques to try!
What is ideation? Understanding the creative process
Ideation is the process of generating new and creative ideas to solve a problem, meet a need or improve a situation. It often involves collective brainstorming where all ideas, even the most daring, are explored without immediate judgement. The aim is to break out of the usual framework of thinking and open the way to innovative solutions.
Ideation plays an essential role in design thinking. This human-centered approach encourages exploring a wide range of ideas to tackle a specific problem. The goal? To move beyond the obvious first solution and diversify your thinking to uncover the most relevant and innovative ideas.
To recap: design thinking is a creative framework for tackling complex challenges. It consists of five key stages: ● Empathy: gaining insight into users’ needs. ● Definition: clearly identifying the problem to solve. ● Ideation: brainstorming creative solutions. ● Prototyping: developing mock-ups or models. ● Testing: evaluating and refining solutions. |
In addition to traditional ideation techniques, it is interesting to note that today, innovation is not limited to within the walls of a company. With open innovation, external input, from partners, users or even the community, can enrich and accelerate idea generation!
How do you prepare an ideation session with your team?
Planning an effective ideation session takes a little preparation. Follow these steps to ensure a productive and inspiring workshop.
Define a clear objective
Before diving in, it’s crucial to clearly define the problem you want to solve or the goal you aim to achieve. Craft a focused question to prepare and guide your team’s thinking. For instance, instead of asking, “How can we improve our product?”, try a more specific question like, “How can we make our product easier for new users to navigate?”
Choose the right participants
Team ideation is all the richer when it brings together people from a variety of backgrounds. Invite people from different departments (marketing, design, technical), as this brings different perspectives and enriches the discussion.
Prepare an environment conducive to creativity
The atmosphere should be relaxed and open. Choose an inspiring location, away from the usual distractions. Use tools like whiteboards, sticky notes, or collaborative software to help visualize ideas more effectively. Ensure the space is comfortable and provides enough room for participants to freely exchange thoughts. For remote collaboration and idea management, consider using digital tools such as a collaborative innovation platform, which allows teams to seamlessly share, develop, and organize their ideas.
Set ground rules
To ensure a positive dynamic, it’s important to establish a few simple rules:
- No idea is a bad idea: encourage participants to put forward all their ideas without fear of judgement;
- Encourage unusual ideas: value participants ideas even if they seems crazy or impossible to develop;
- Favour quantity: the more ideas there are, the easier it is to find innovative solutions;
- Build on the ideas of others: encourage team members to build on the proposals of others to enrich the collective thinking.
Choose the ideation method
There are various techniques to guide the ideation process. Depending on the session’s objective, select the method that best suits your needs. For instance, brainstorming works well for quickly generating a high volume of ideas, while mind mapping is better suited for organizing and structuring complex concepts.
Prepare materials and resources
Make sure to gather all the materials you’ll need: sticky notes, markers, paper, or digital tools if the session is being held remotely. Visual resources or examples of ideas can also be great for sparking creativity.
Plan the timing
Set a specific time for the session (generally between 1 and 2 hours). A limited amount of time stimulates creativity and avoids digressions. Also plan breaks to allow the team to recharge their batteries and come back with new ideas.
Technique 1: Traditional brainstorming
Traditional brainstorming is one of the most widely used and straightforward ideation techniques. The concept is simple: a group gathers to generate a large volume of ideas within a set timeframe, focusing on creativity rather than feasibility or quality.
During a brainstorming session, a few key rules usually apply:
- No judgment: every idea is valid, no matter how unconventional;
- Encourage quantity: the more ideas, the higher the chance of discovering innovative solutions;
- Value unusual ideas: seek quantity of ideas, with wildness wilfully allowed;
- Build on others’ ideas: participants are encouraged to expand upon or refine existing suggestions.
One of the advantages of this method is that it allows you to quickly explore a wide range of solutions, which is particularly useful in the research phase or when faced with a complex problem. It’s also an excellent way of stimulating team spirit and strengthening collaboration.
Technique 2: the SCAMPER method
This approach involves examining an idea or product from different angles using seven specific actions, of which the acronym SCAMPER is the key:
- S for Substitute: what can I replace in this idea?
- C for Combine: what elements can I combine to create something new?
- A for Adapt: how can I adjust this idea to adapt it to another context?
- M for Modify: what can I change in this idea to improve it?
- P for Propose: how could this idea be used differently?
- E for Eliminate: what can I remove to simplify or improve the idea?
- R for Reorganise: how could I rearrange the elements of this idea to create a new approach?
What makes the SCAMPER method an excellent tool for stimulating creativity?
It encourages you to think in a systematic and structured way. By focusing on one aspect at a time, participants can explore simple or profound changes effectively.
Technique 3: Mind mapping
Mind mapping is a visual tool designed to help organize and structure ideas in an intuitive way. It involves creating a graphic representation, with the central idea at the core and related concepts branching outwards. These branches can further split into sub-branches for additional details.
Key takeaway: Mind mapping helps visualize the connections between ideas and explore their logical relationships. |
Benefits of mind mapping include:
- Clarity: the map format makes the structure and hierarchy of ideas instantly clear;
- Creativity: the visual nature of the technique encourages divergent thinking and inspires new idea associations;
- Flexibility: mind mapping is versatile and can be applied to a variety of tasks, from problem-solving to presentation planning or product development.
Technique 4: Role-playing
Role-playing is an ideation technique where participants take on different roles or points of view to generate ideas and explore solutions.
The idea is that by embodying a character or end-user, team members are encouraged to think about issues from a new angle.
During a role-playing session, each participant is assigned a specific role – it could be a user, a customer, a competitor or even an object or service. The aim is to explore the needs, motivations and challenges of these roles to better understand their perspectives.
Technique 5: The reverse question technique
As you may have guessed, the reverse question technique consists of asking a question that is the opposite of the one you normally ask yourself to solve a problem.
The idea is to reverse the perspective and stimulate creativity by encouraging participants to think differently and explore original solutions.
Instead of focusing directly on how to solve a problem, this technique invites participants to ask questions such as: ‘What would happen if we wanted this problem to get worse?’ or ‘How could we make this product more difficult to use?
This method is ideal when you feel ‘stuck’ by ideas that are too conventional, or when it’s difficult to think outside the box. It can also be particularly useful in the early stages of ideation to unsettle participants and open up new avenues.
How does an ideation stage work?
Now that you’ve familiarised yourself with the 5 best ideation techniques, let’s find out how an ideation stage works in practice.
There are generally three key phases: divergence, emergence and convergence.
Phase 1: Divergence
The divergence phase consists of exploring a wide range of ideas without judgement. The aim is to encourage creativity and open up all possible avenues, even the most daring. During this phase, it is crucial to encourage the quantity of ideas rather than the quality. This can be done using techniques such as brainstorming or mind mapping.
Phase 2: Emergence
Once a large number of ideas have been generated, the emergence phase consists of identifying common themes or strong ideas among all the proposals. This is a reflection phase where the ideas are analyzed, refined and combined. Participants begin to group together similar concepts, organize them and identify the most interesting or promising solutions.
Phase 3: Convergence
Finally, the convergence phase consists of selecting and refining the strongest and most relevant ideas to respond to the problem or objective set. This stage often involves a filtering process: some ideas will be eliminated, while others will be developed and deepened.
The aim? To reduce the number of ideas and concentrate on those that seem most feasible, effective and aligned with user needs or project constraints.
Find out more about ideation…
- “Bounded Ideation Theory.” Journal of Management Information Systems, 2010.
- “Comparing Ideation Techniques for Beginning Designers.” Journal of Mechanical Design, 2016.
- “Increasing team ideation by sequencing the task type and content.” Design Studies, 2020.
- “Design Thinking for Innovation. Stress Testing Human Factors in Ideation Sessions.” The Design Journal, 2019.
CEO & Co-Founder Yumana
