How to Ideate Better— Learn the Path to Thinking Differently

The Power of Ideas

What do calligraphy and personal computers have in common?

They were both crucial in creating the MacBook. Steve Jobs himself pointed to his calligraphy college class as a reason he designed “beautiful typography” into the Mac.

The ability to connect seemingly unrelated ideas is key in innovation, which is often defined as “a new, executed idea that brings value.” Most things aren’t really new however, but a combination of existing things or ideas that haven’t been combined before. Continue to make an impact and differentiate yourself by reconsidering concepts you may previously not have seen as related… Just like Steve Jobs did.

Now, let’s explore how you can learn this skill, too.

What is Ideation?

How do you come up with new ideas to innovate? You ideate. Stanford d.school describes ideation as, “the mode of the design process in which you concentrate on idea generation. Mentally it represents a process of ‘going wide’ in terms of concepts and outcomes. Ideation provides both the fuel and also the source material for building prototypes and getting innovative solutions into the hands of your users.”

Why Ideation?

There are many benefits to leveraging ideation: staying competitive and creating valuable experiences and solutions are just the beginning. Ideation will help you and your team to:

• Step beyond the initial obvious solutions and uncover unexpected areas of innovation.
• Bring together perspectives from diverse groups to leverage differences and create better solutions.
• Increase volume and variety for more options.
• And last but not least, have fun in the process!

How Do You Ideate?

Ideations are most common in workshop form, where everyone is invited to share their perspective within a group workshop. Typical best practices are:

✔️ Understand the problem before you ideate — People often jump straight into problem-solving and forget that their amazing solution is useless unless it solves a valuable problem.

✔️ Think individually first, then discuss as a group — Listen to each other and ensure that all perspectives are heard no matter who usually speaks first or loudest.

✔️ Capture all ideas — No ideas are bad ideas.

✔️ Generate a volume of ideas before you filter them — The Nobel Prize Winner Linus Paulig said it best: “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.”

✔️ Enable a fun experience — Creativity thrives in a trusting and engaging environment.

✔️ Time is precious, but speed is better — Set time goals for your exercises and generate ideas quickly to avoid judgement.

✔️ Invite a team with a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences — People with different ways of thinking and living produce the most desirable, viable, and feasible innovations.

✔️ Set rules for your ideation-session — Knowing the boundaries allows increased creativity.

Top 5 Ideation Techniques

There are so many ways to get a team’s creativity going. Five easy and fun techniques to get started with, and my personal favorites are:

• Crazy ideas — Without laws, social, cultural, economical or physical rules, what are the absolute craziest ideas for solving the challenge? This helps to get ideation started and to avoid judgement.
• ‘Yes, and…’ instead of ‘Yes, but…’ — Rather than considering why ideas won’t work, build on each idea by adding ways to make it better.
• How would IKEA, Amazon, or SpaceX do it? — Explore the challenge as if you were an innovator you admire to help reduce bias of what you think is and isn’t possible for you.
• Mash-up — Combine (sometimes seemingly non-related) concepts like a zoo and a phone or doing laundry and cars. This helps to see things from new perspectives.
• Constraints — Establish constraints. How would you solve the challenge in half the time, with no budget or with only two people?

Imagine the Impossible

Meeting a stranger from the Internet alone has always been considered dangerous. Our parents have always told us not to get into a car with people we don’t know. The exact opposite of what we were taught is today the business model of one of the most innovative companies of our time, Uber.

Innovation is taking existing concepts and connecting them in new ways. We often move through life without making time to think creatively or dismiss ideas out of fear of being wrong or judged. Ultimately, there are no rules in ideation other than those you decide. These methods are intended to spark creativity and support you and your team to generate new, better, and more ideas so you can challenge the status quo and explore new possibilities to test. And remember that, equally important is what you decide to do with those ideas once the workshop is over.

So, bring your team together, pick your favorite ideation technique and start innovating.

Which ideation technique are you excited to use?

Please share your thoughts about what you read in this article. I’d love to hear from you ❤