November 19, 2018
By Ali Pohn
Your team is ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work brainstorming wonderful new ideas that will delight your customer and fill your innovation pipeline. But hold on a second – is it that easy to get new, different, and consumer relevant ideas? Heck no!
Before you start ideating take into consideration these 10 tips that will result in an effective brainstorming session and help to generate the next great, consumer relevant, and revenue driving idea for your business.
1. KNOW WHERE YOU WANT TO GO. Do you know what you want to achieve with the ideation? Can you articulate what success looks like and how will it be measured? If not, take the time to define the goals and objectives of the ideation before you commit your organization to the resources this effort takes.
2. KEEP THE CONSUMER TOP OF MIND. Start your ideation by grounding everyone in with a deep understanding of your target audience. If you don’t have this knowledge yet, conduct social listening or invest in research with your consumer. Know who you’re creating the ideas for and what problems and needs exist that your brand can solve in creative new ways.
3. LEVERAGE DIVERSITY OF THINKING. Different points of view add valuable dimension in ideation so be inclusive. Bring in team members from a variety of functions, even those who don’t have experience in the area in which you are innovating. At Linkage, we often recruit outside parties and consumers to co-create with your team to add depth, breadth, and passion to the ideas generated.
4. FOCUS, BUT DON’T LIMIT. You’ll know a lot about your target audience and what you want to achieve from your preliminary research. Identify the most compelling insight themes from the research and make those themes the focus for your innovation session. Within that focal point, be limitless in your pursuit of ideas that solve a consumer need, motivation, or challenge.
5. SPARK IDEAS WITH CREATIVITY AND HUMOR. Stimulate creative thoughts with fun and interactive skits and games developed around the relevant insight themes. Fun and laughter have a physical impact, freeing the imagination and leading to genuine creativity to get to breakthrough ideas. Whenever we serve as outside innovation consultants, we make sure to improve plenty of custom creative exercises in our proposal.
6. FOCUS ON THE WHAT, NOT THE HOW. The moment you hear “we can’t do that because…,” creativity loses steam. It happens in almost every ideation session, and when it does, it’s important to get your team back on track right away. Remember, you want to keep your team AND their ideas “out of the box,” as much as possible. Business acumen and practicality will be added in later steps to cull and refine ideas.
7. GO FOR LEAPS AND STRETCHES. Remind your team that all ideas are good ideas. The leaps – those great big, out-there ideas are inspiring. Equally valuable are the stretches – those smaller, incremental, close-in ideas because all ideas lead to more ideas. Don’t prejudge, and therefore hold back on the stretch ideas.
8. SPEND TIME WITH IDEAS THAT RISE TO THE TOP. When participants identify an idea they love, give them a way to quickly and easily flesh out that idea. Name it. Identify its emotional and physical benefit. Describe what it looks like or feels like to the consumer. Give it a tagline. Invite everyone involved to build on those fleshed-out ideas and capture all the “builds”.
9. SCHEDULE PHASE TWO TO FOCUS ON THE HOW, WHO, AND WHEN. After the initial brainstorm, schedule a second stage. Here’s when you make your ideas actionable with sound business acumen. Invite a subset of the first group to explore whether the idea is financially viable, can be delivered in a reasonable timeframe, fits your company’s mission, and meets a true consumer need in a differentiated way. Cull, combine, tweak, and refine as you determine which ideas to move forward,
10. SAVE ALL IDEAS AS THEY LEAD SOMEWHERE. And finally, don’t lose any of the ideas the team generated. Make note of them, share them, and store them where any team member can access them for a jolt of inspiration. Who knows where each idea can ultimately lead you?
These tips will help you to get the best out of your innovation sessions. One final thought – consider bringing in an insights and innovation expert to facilitate the process. It will free you from worrying about the details or trying to serve both as facilitator and participant. We’d love to help you incorporate our tried-and-true techniques and set the stage for a creative session to get the most innovative thinking out of your organization.
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