Ideation management and Leadership
Ideation management and Leadership
An Idea is to unlock Your Creative Potential.
In today’s world, creativity is considered a highly appreciated, not to say indispensable element. In almost every occupation, there is a place for a certain level of creativity and innovative thinking required. Creativity of employees has always been seen as the fundamental element for organizations’ success and continuous development.
Being?creative?gives us opportunities to try out new ideas, and new ways of thinking and problem-solving.?Creative?activities help us acknowledge and celebrate our own uniqueness and diversity.?Creativity?encourages self-expression, a way to create something from personal feelings and experiences.
Innovation as Leadership?and Professional Development. The primary objective of?Leadership?and Professional Development is to cultivate emerging leaders who show nascent traits of greatness—and to harness their value they bring to their organizations.
An Idea can be the driving force behind phenomenal corporate growth. The way creativity and innovation is handled, it can initiate profound changes all cross the organization and enable ordinary men and women achieve extraordinary results.
What is idea management?
Ideation management, sometimes referred to as idea management, is a formalization of the processes involved in gathering, sharing, analyzing and executing on ideas generated within an enterprise and its collaborative networks.
The?Nielsen Norman Group?defines ideation as “the process of generating a broad set of ideas on a given topic, with no attempt to judge or evaluate them.”
In essence, idea management can be defined as systematically managing the process of collecting and developing ideas and insights to get the most out of them.
In practice, we typically consider idea management to be formed of four distinct but overlapping areas:?Strategy, Processes,?Tools & Methods, as well as?Culture.
To succeed in idea management, an organization has to consider and address all of these areas in a way that is aligned with the goals and capabilities of the organization.
Why is idea management important?
Every innovation starts from an idea, so without them, there won’t be innovation.
What’s more, the statistics indicate that most organizations?fail in the majority of their innovation attempts..
So, for an organization to increase the probability of succeeding in innovation, it simply makes sense to try to collect, manage and develop a large number of different ideas.
However, most organizations are only able to implement a small percentage of the ideas they have, so they should naturally also seek to improve their capability to turn those ideas into something useful.
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Ideation?
Ideation?is the process where you generate ideas and solutions through sessions such as Sketching, Prototyping, Brainstorming, Brain writing, Worst Possible Idea, and a wealth of other?ideation?techniques.?Ideation?is also the third stage in the Design Thinking process.
In the?Ideation stage, design thinkers spark off ideas — in the form of questions and solutions — through creative and curious activities such as Brainstorms and Worst Possible Idea. ... The main aim of the?Ideation stage?is to use creativity and innovation in order to develop solutions
While?brainstorming?uses a variety of exercises to unlock new thinking about old subjects – and follows a trajectory of immersion, incubation and insight generation,?ideation?is more visionary in nature, seeking to see and discern solutions for problems that are not yet defined in many cases
The main aim of an ideation session is to uncover and explore new angles and avenues—to think outside the box. For the sake of innovation and creativity, it is essential that the ideation phase be a “judgment-free zone”.
Before an ideation session
Introduce a change of scenery
If you want to encourage outside-the-box thinking, it’s important to take yourself—and your team—quite literally outside of the box. It might seem like a minor detail, but the physical space in which you hold your ideation session can have a major impact. Move away from the usual setting, be it the boardroom or your desk, and hold your session somewhere completely new. A new environment introduces new stimuli, which in turn can help to trigger fresh ways of thinking.
Create a relaxed environment
The best ideation sessions are those where the participants feel at ease. The ideation phase should be a safe space—but most people will need some coaxing before they feel comfortable sharing their wildest ideas. Have some ice-breaker exercise?prepared to bring the group together, relieve any tension, and get people warmed up.
Use what you’ve learned from the Empathize and Define stages: Prepare a list of “How might we…?” questions
While ideation is all about generating as many ideas as possible, it’s important to steer this process in the right direction. This is where stages one and two of the Design Thinking process come in: Empathize and Define.
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Key ideation techniques
Now you have everything in place for your ideation session, there’s just one thing left to do: Choose which ideation techniques you’re going to use. Here are some of the most common ideation techniques used by designers:
Analogies
By definition,?analogy?is “a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject to another.” An analogy provides a comparison between one thing and another, serving as a means of explanation or clarification.
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Body storming
The body storming technique gets you to physically experience a situation in order to spark new ideas. If you’re struggling to get close to the problem, body storming is a great way to generate?genuine user empathy.
Brainstorming
Brainstorming is one of the oldest tricks in the book when it comes to generating new ideas as a group. In a brainstorming session, you verbally bounce ideas off of each other in the hopes of finding a blended solution.
The Apollo 13 Mission Control team faced a huge number of seemingly insurmountable obstacles after an oxygen tank exploded on board the 1970 mission to the moon. They needed to find a new route that would get the astronauts back to Earth quickly with a limited supply of life-supporting fuel and power.
The most pressing problem was a buildup of carbon dioxide in the ship. Without a replacement scrubber, stored out of reach in a different module in the craft, the crew would soon asphyxiate from their own exhalations.
The term “brainstorm” was popularized by the ad agency executive Alex Osborn in his 1953 book?Applied Imagination?(though he had outlined his method in a 1948 book,?Your Creative Power). Osborn claimed that by organizing a group to attack a creative problem “commando fashion, with each stormer attacking the same objective,” creative output could be doubled. Osborn created 2 main rules for a successful brainstorm: 1.Defer judgment and 2.Reach for quantity
A key part of the brainstorming process is the facilitator—someone who will lead the session, keep track of time, and set up the space for the group. This facilitator can also make sure that the group comes prepared with a mission framed by problem statements.
After the brainstorm
When the brainstorm is finished and there are a hundred ideas on the board, it’s easy enough to give high fives all around and walk away without really having accomplished much. Leave a little time after the brainstorm to review and capture the ideas that were shared.
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Capture and move to prototyping
Once you’ve selected ideas in each category, carry them into prototyping, ensuring that you don’t walk away from the session with just the safest choice. Use a phone to photograph the whole board, and then extract the top ideas in a document which can be used to kick off the prototyping process (Google Docs is great for this).
Prototyping is a flaring part of the design thinking process. Even if a selected idea is so crazy it doesn’t seem worthy of a test, figure out what’s attractive in that solution, and use that to inspire a prototype. The goal is to come into the?Prototype?phase with multiple solutions to build and then test.
Brainwriting
An alternative to traditional brainstorming is brainwriting. Instead of verbally sharing ideas, participants write down their ideas before passing them on to someone else. The next person reads these ideas and adds their own, and so the process continues until each person’s ideas have done a full rotation. All ideas are then collected and placed in front of the group for discussion.
Brainwalking
This is the more dynamic, physical version of brainwriting. Instead of passing pieces of paper around the room, the designers themselves move between different “ideation stations”. Just like brainwriting, they’ll add their own ideas before moving on to the next station.
Gamestorming
Gamestorming is the gamification of brainstorming, and a popular technique for both ideation and problem-solving. Gamifying classic ideation methods adds an extra element of engagement and interactivity—and helps to suspend some of the normal “rules” of everyday life.
Mindmapping?
Developed by Tony Buzan in 1972, mindmapping is a visual ideation technique that encourages you to draw connections between different sets of ideas or information. You’ll start by writing a keyword in the middle of the page (normally related to your problem statement). On the same piece of paper, you then surround this word with any and all ideas that come to mind. Finally, you’ll think about how these ideas are connected, depicting said connections with lines and curves—resulting in a visual map.
What if you’re on your own, with no one to run a brainstorming session with? In that case, mind maps are your friend! The concept is simple, but mind maps can be a powerful way to move from conventional ideas to unpredictable, innovative ones. The following version of this technique is adapted from David and Tom Kelley’s?Creative Confidence. You can start with a problem statement like, “A better birthday party for a 1-year-old.”
Write your topic or problem statement in the middle of a piece of paper, and circle it. Make connections to that central node, and write them down. In this example, you might write down “cupcakes to devour” and “make it for the adults” as 2 directions to investigate.
Worst Possible Idea
Similar to reverse thinking, the worst possible idea technique is great for putting the group at ease and?removing creative blocks. Even if the ideation session has been declared a judgment-free zone, there is inevitably a certain amount of pressure to find a viable solution that your peers will like. Going in search of the worst possible idea takes away this pressure. Not only that: Reflecting on what’s so terrible about these ideas can reveal valuable insights into what a good idea might look like.
Get Started in Applying Ideation Methods
Ideation facilitation is a challenging and complex task. It requires experience in understanding and managing teams, people dynamics, adaptability and flexibility and a range of other soft skills, which in reality are really hard to master. Having said that, there's nothing like experience to help you learn the ropes of any field. The best way to learn is to take the theory and techniques you learn from the experts, and then apply and?test?them in your own context and adapt them to your own needs.
To summarize, the key factors for succeeding in idea management are, for the most part, the same factors that?top innovators get right:
The most successful organizations are simultaneously able to integrate all of these factors in their day-to-day operating practices. This certainly isn’t easy, but it is what you should strive for. The ultimate challenge before every corporation is to tap the creative thinking skill of everyone in the Organization for it success in reality.
‘Investing time and resources in ideation can increase and accelerate innovation while keeping you focused on the mission of your business or organization.’
As?more than 80% of executives?consider innovation to be very important for the future of their organization, both idea and innovation management is clearly crucial concepts for the long-term success of any organization.
“Analysis is all peripheral. What is central to business is the joy of creating.” –Peter Robinson.
Vedic Management “ Will have its authority in the total authority of Natural Law- Higher intelligence – creative intelligence; ‘YASMIN DEVA’ – in which reside all the devas, the impulses of creative intelligence, the Laws of Nature.”