Ideation

Ideation is the evaluation of previously gained information in order to generate and hone ideas into the first stage of solution building. I like to think of it as Brainstorming 2.0, as it has more direction, intention, and synthesis than regular old brainstorming. Ideation is first about thinking wide. We expand the net to capture every idea, good or bad, familiar or never-before-seen. It is important not to judge ideas too quickly, but instead, to use facilitation and brainstorming tactics to come up with as many ideas as possible.

With every idea on the table, we can then begin evaluation—maybe individual rocket ships are not the ideal form of commuting to work, but what is attractive about that idea? Is there any aspect of that inspiration that can evolve into something useful? We saved our judgment for this moment, and now, with both inside and outside-the-box thinking on the table, we can starting honing in on a few key insights which will generate a solution space.

Bringing in Business Thinking: Ideation is the home of the Post-It. Offices are now being designed to revolve around this process, emphasizing its importance to business development. While idea generation should be a wide-open, judgment-free process, our business tools are vital to the evaluation and eventual selection of the ideas which we build into solutions. Here, competitive analysis and forecasting models are essential to understanding the validity of potential products and services that we have brainstormed. It is important to be creative and innovative with our idea generation, but then we have to be equally concerned with the strength and soundness of these ideas.