The Innovation Firm

Put Away the Dartboard: Beyond Brainstorming

Posted: March 26th, 2009 in Solution Generation

One of the flashiest and most exciting parts of any innovation project is ideation. The generation of ideas is where that creative “magic” happens, the place where people can give vent to all of the ideas which have been building in them over the years and think brilliant thoughts in an unconstrained, blue sky setting. It is the part of the process where where we can get creative and go to off-site locations and play games and dress up in costumes and really brainstorm without having to worry about eventual realities like commercialization and customer context.

While this may overstate the “let’s get creative!” mindset a bit, the problems with the above approach to ideation are clear. Anyone who has participated in a few of these creative brainstorming sessions can likely attest, they are often big on production on the day of the session but light on in-market results several months down the line.

Ideation is an important part of the innovation process, and done right, it can be an invigorating, challenging, and yes, creatively-charged experience. However, there are a few guidelines that can help take an ideation process beyond just brainstorming and into the realm of true strategic innovation.

Develop Solutions, Not Ideas

The ultimate determinant of a new product or service’s success is whether or not it satisfies a customer or consumer need. No matter how brilliant the branding or ground-breaking technology, if nobody needs your product or service, it will not sell.

For this reason, it is dangerous to think of ideation as the starting point of the innovation process. Instead, the process must start much earlier, with the uncovering of customer or consumer needs through upfront research. Ideation can only be conducted once you have developed a set of customer/consumer problems, needs, and opportunities to use as a context and stimulus during ideation. For this reason, it is really more accurate to think of the creative generation step of the process as “Solution Generation,” rather than simply “ideation.” The goal is to develop not just new ideas-because anybody can come up with those-but new solutions to customer/consumer problems.

This does not mean that you should let customers or consumers do your ideation for you. Front end research should seek to build an understanding of customer/consumer desires, needs, and behavior-it should not actively solicit ideas for solutions to these needs. The distinction is an important one, because while customers are the best source of insight into their problems and needs, they often make poor ideators. Instead, the insights gained in communicating with them should be used to fuel strategic solution generation.

Engage Experts (Who Aren’t You)

Let it be said right off the bat that it is vitally important to leverage internal resources when conducting any ideation exercises. Your own people are the ones who are going to know your business best-know your technical capabilities, know your core competencies, know your customer networks, your distribution systems, your key channels, etc. They should without question be active participants whenever you are generating new solutions to customer or consumer problems, and that goes for B2B and consumer goods/service companies.

That said, using only internal resources can be a real impediment to successful ideation, particularly when the goal is to develop game-changing new products-real new-to-the-category ideas, as opposed to line extensions or improvements.

The problem is that the greatest strength of internal resources-that they know all of your capabilities - can also be their greatest weakness. Often it is too easy to think within the framework of what is already possible at a given company, to shoot down an idea even before it leaves your mouth because you are too familiar with all the reasons why it supposedly can’t happen. While this type of knowledge can be invaluable in later sessions where ideas are iteratively built, screened, and shaped into concepts that are feasible in the real world, it can be disastrous in ideation sessions where the goal is to generate entirely new solutions to consumer or customer problems.

For this reason, some of the best and most challenging ideas often result from the interplay between external experts and internal company resources. External category experts bring a perspective that is not always present in solely internal ideation sessions.

For example, if you were a major food manufacturer seeking to develop new products that would revolutionize the frozen dinner aisle, you might enlist chefs, food scientists, foodservice employees, and even grocery retail channel experts to help generate ideas. So long as they remain focused by the front-end research stimulus you have gathered, an outside perspective can illuminate new possibilities that would have been ignored or stifled otherwise.

Even more useful than a solely expert session can be one involving a mixed group, in which internal resources help provide a context and real-world builds to the further-out ideas of the external participants. That collaborative dynamic is the best-case scenario for any ideation session.

Know Your Goals

It is important to establish metrics to evaluate the ideas which are generated in ideation. And it is equally important to establish those metrics at the outset of the innovation effort, before ideation takes place. These metrics should serve as your innovation screening criteria as you go through the ideation process, giving you:

*    A tangible strategic target to aim for as you conduct ideation
*    A concrete scope to keep your ideation grounded in a context
*    A method of evaluating, shaping, and sometimes eliminating ideas following ideation

The mistake that some companies to make is to set their screening criteria too late in the process, when ideas have already been generated. Without the screens acting as a guiding force throughout the project, it is too easy to generate and develop ideas that ultimately do not advance your project’s strategic goals.

Ultimately, these three rules alone are not enough to guarantee a successful ideation experience. They must take place within a systematic innovation process, and the sessions themselves should utilize custom-built exercises that focus creativity and be led by experienced moderators and a talented team. However, if one keeps in mind that the goal, more than just ideation, is true Solution Generation, then you are already well on the road to moving beyond the cliché of basic “brainstorming.”

Is Brainstorming a Drug?

Posted: March 13th, 2009 in Solution Generation

Brainstorming is a Drug

In Innovation processes (especially new product and service development), developing good solutions for consumer problems plays a critical role. Often, companies treat brainstorming as their entire solution generation process, where it should ideally play only a small role, if any.   Some new scientific findings help illustrate why brainstorming might be so popular despite it’s lack of efficacy.

Researchers at Harvard and Princeton recently found evidence that rapid thinking produces an artificially elevated mood. Interestingly, the “rapid thinking” in the experiments looks a lot like what we in the innovation business call brainstorming.

In one segment of the experiments, researchers had participants generate as many problem-solving ideas as possible, as quickly as possible, for 10 minutes. “Results suggested that thinking fast made participants feel more elated, creative and, to a lesser degree, energetic and powerful.” Link

Reading this report led me to reflect on the difference between brainstorming and the type of idea generation that can be a useful part of the innovation process.

In most people’s minds, brainstorming has a very unconstrained and random quality, which can sometimes help stimulate creativity. That kind of brainstorming can provide some building blocks for real solutions, and is sometimes useful as a warm-up to the real task of generating truly useful concepts. Unfortunately all too often it’s seen as both the beginning and end of solution generation.

There are good and bad ways to generate solutions. The bad way is to generate as many ideas as you can, as fast as you can, with no regard for practicality And, yes, it can be a lot of fun.

In the mind of an innovator, good solution generation is still creative, and it doesn’t have to be slow-paced, but it does have to take customer needs and project requirements as the foundation for all ideas generated. Thinking outside the box is just fine, as long as the ultimate goal is to meet a real, identified customer need. When you put constraints on your ideation activity, it might not act as a mood-booster, but it can be infinitely more productive.

Science tells us that brainstorming feels good – it elevates mood measurably. It can be a good way to lubricate mental gears and get a solution generation session going. In the innovation process, an approach that churns out a large volume of ideas doesn’t necessarily mean there will be many good ones, or even that rare diamond in the rough. The results of this study should serve as a warning – brainstorming may deliver a quick high, but rigorous solution generation is the way to avoid an innovation hangover.