As businesses increasingly turn to innovative solutions to maintain their competitive edge, ideation plays a crucial role in the development of groundbreaking products and services.
At Aster Fab, we facilitate various types of ideation workshops, leveraging different methodologies depending on your goals. Here are the top 10 ideation techniques, each designed to help you navigate the innovation process effectively.
🎯 Massive idea generation
In situations where you are looking to develop many ideas, these methods help teams to move beyond conventional ways of thinking:
- Brainstorming: Brainstorming is a method teams use to generate ideas to solve well-defined problems. In controlled conditions and a free-thinking environment, teams approach a problem by methods like “How might we” questions.
- Brainwriting: Unlike brainstorming, ideas are written anonymously before being discussed, encouraging participation from all team members.
- Crazy 8’s: Each participant sketches eight ideas in eight minutes, fostering rapid ideation and creativity.
- Reverse brainstorming: Rather than actually solving the problem, groups attempt to come up with the best means of causing your solution to fail. This will reveal things you’ve overlooked and stimulate new ideas.
🔍 Structured exploration
Sometimes, you must examine ideas in a structured way to discover new possibilities or enhance current ideas.
- SCAMPER: Encourages transformation through seven key actions: substituting, combining, adapting, modifying, putting to another use, eliminating, and rearranging. By applying these principles, teams can break out of conventional solutions and explore innovative alternatives
💡 Concept stimulation
To challenge assumptions and stimulate creative thinking, these methods help teams in taking new perspectives:
- Six thinking hats (Edward de Bono): Gives participants six different roles, represented by colored hats. Each role – facts, feelings, risks, optimism, creativity and control- fosters a more disciplined and varied style of problem solving
- Call to a hero: Encourages participants to put themselves in the mind of a celebrity or a hero and imagine how they would tackle the challenge. Placing themselves in someone else’s position, teams come up with creative, outside-the-box solutions that they may not have thought of otherwise.
🖼️ Concept visualization
Concepts can be tricky to grasp. These techniques help teams to visualize their ideas, making them more tangible and actionable:
- Mind mapping: Powerful tool for organizing and connecting ideas in a visual way. Starting from a core idea and expanding, from there, teams can identify how concepts relate to each other and generate new ideas.
👥 User-centered innovation
These practices ensure that ideas align with user needs:
- Rapid prototyping: Refers to the quick creation of prototypes such as sketches, paper models, or digital mockups. This process allows teams to receive early user feedback, identify flaws before heavy investment.
- Design thinking: A human-centered methodology that ensures ideas are desirable, feasible, and viable. Through prioritizing user needs, technical feasibility, and business viability, this approach encourages continuous iteration and refinement throughout the innovation process.