How can a structured ideation approach improve your innovation skills?

?? Ideation is at the core of the innovation process. So, a structured approach helps to open up to new possibilities and canalize ideas for a specific purpose. Innovation is not just about having many ideas (most people do)) but focusing on a specific goal. 1. First, recall ideation is about solving a problem. 2. Use different brainstorming techniques with specific rules to open up idea generation. 3. A good ideation session follows certain rules: deferring judgment to encourage creativity, going for quantity, going wild, or having crazy ideas are allowed, and writing down all your ideas - good or bad. 4. Recall idea generation is different from idea selection (this will come later) 5. Frame positive momentum and high energy. Cheers!

Structured ideation sounds a bit dull and too serious, while at its core, it is just having a "recipe" around generating ideas. Let's put this straight: everybody can great creative, it's just how you set the stage and help people become creative. That is what "structured" ideation means: having a step by step process of getting creative. Which, in the end, helps unlock the creative genius in e-v-e-r-y-o-n-e. Of course, there's tens of recipes out there which I highly encourage to try out and see what works best (keep in mind there is no jumping to generating ideas, there needs to be always an understanding the problem and an inspiration phase). The rest is, some call it, just magic, some call it method of producing ideas??

The ideation process must break the myth that ideas are a kind of epiphany that innovators have. Structuring the divergent thinking process with creative techniques is crucial to promote the generation of ideas and to ensure that these can be used in the innovation funnel. First, it is necessary to conduct a thorough analysis and understanding of the environment, identify problems and pain points, and from there launch the challenge questions we face: How might we? From there, an idea generation process begins that can be supported by techniques such as Scamper, the six hats, or the well-known brainstorming.

It’s indeed a challenge to bring “creativity” into a business organization. It may sound counter intuitive but you need to make “space” for the creativity to emerge and to cultivate it. You can do this by having a system that allows for it. Design thinking for example is a system and it can be applied to creative processes for innovation.

If you use a design thinking approach, you should start with an empathy phase, in which problems are analyzed, and we deep into users needs and reality. From this phase, we must generate insights or learnings from the previous phase. From here, I can launch challenges , How might we? At this point, we begin with divergent methods of idea generation and move on to convergent methods where we select the most interesting ones. As divergent methods, we can use tools like brainstorming or brainwriting, as well as techniques like Edward de Bono's six thinking hats, or techniques based on analogy. Methods like Scamper are very interesting for creating new products.

There are a series of recommendations that can help you in your process of generating ideas: First. Keep your judgments aside. Do not let your point of view take over and prevent you from being aware of the learnings from the empathy phase. Second. Everything in its own time. Do not try to select ideas too soon. Give it time, first generate as many ideas as you can and then the time will come to evaluate them. Third. Use divergent and convergent creative techniques. It is about opening the creative focus and then moving on to the selection phase of the best ideas. Fourth. Generate a creative environment or space that support your creative work. It is important that the team has the spaces, the resources and the necessary time.

During my career, I tended to be more disruptive. So let’s think beyond the box ??!! 1?? The first step in innovation is to be receptive with the environment. This requires an unstructured listening, observing, questioning. 2?? the analysis following this early approaches needs to be unbiased if we want to identify the true market needs 3?? then in the MVP phase we need to be able to collect those “reactions” beyond our line of sight, which could drive the survival pivots. Nonetheless, it takes an open mind to build a vision and constantly test it against the environment. My advice: do not be ashamed of being unstructured…and a bit crazy! ??