How Can Ideation Help

Choosing the right participants is key to a successful ideation session. Start with a manageable number of people, ideally, less than 20 people. The only prerequisite is that they need to agree to actively participate throughout the ideation session. Make sure that the group of people is diverse. Don't just think of diversity as race, age, sex, although, you want a good mix of people based upon those criteria, but you also want diversity by function (engineering, marketing, sales, finance), diversity by title (VP, Manager, Admin, Tech) and even diversity by location (field sales, warehouse, corporate office). The goal is to gather a group of creative people with a broad range of perspectives, thoughts and ideas. You will be surprised by what a group of people that don't usually work together will come up with. Avoid the trap of just ideating within your own group or with just engineers.

Inspiration can come in many forms, but you need to make sure that your ideation team gets inspiration from some applicable sources. Think about taking the team on "store walks" to look at competitive products within the category that you are going to ideate on. You can also hit some high-end stores to see how style and design are manifesting in today's high-end products. You can ask your participants to do a little "homework" by choosing some magazine images that they feel exemplify innovation. As the ideation session gets started they can share their images with the rest of the group and explain why they feel the images show innovation.

If you've done some ethnographic work, put together a few slides to show the group who the consumer is. Include any insights that you have derived from your research and observations. Those observations can be more actionable when focused through a consumer lens.

An Insight statement should be written with the following guidelines:

• As a concise, objective statement describing an observed consumer behavior, product problem, or a consumer want or need.

• Should be written as a general statement since it represents a higher-level learning from a specific observation.

A challenge statement is also a useful tool to help focus on an insight and create ideas.

• Challenge statement should begin with words such as "How might we" or "What if”

• Should be simple, focused and aspirational.

• Choose a specific action for your challenge statement, like reduce, improve, or eliminate.

It's tempting to have your ideation session at the office, its easy, it's free, and everyone is already there. If you truly want to maximize the output and impact of your ideation session consider having it offsite. Get away from the phones, computers, and "pop in" conversations. Having it off site will help your participants focus, slow down, and be more creative. An offsite location will also prevent participants from drifting away to check email or to take a quick meeting. Now, if you really want to take it to the next level consider a non-businesslike, fun, eclectic space like the Catalyst Ranch in Chicago. Most cities have some type of creative space for business meetings. You might have to look around to find one but it will be well worth the effort. These creative spaces allow the participants to relax, drop the business jargon, and just have fun. These spaces absolutely improve creativity and quality of output.

Curation seems simple enough, collect all of the similar ideas into a cluster, but it can often become monotonous and boring for everyone involved. This happens when every participant reads out every one of their ideas. Many of the ideas are very similar and the process feels like it drags on forever. Try having each person read one of their ideas and then ask for everyone to bring up any similar ideas. This keeps everyone engaged because they have to review their ideas for similarities and it dramatically reduces the time it takes to curate.

Now that you have all of the ideas clustered its time to vote on which ideas the team feels are the best. Give each cluster a general name for the idea it represents so that participants can easily understand and refer to a cluster without having to review all of the ideas included. Give each participant three votes. This is often done with dot stickers, but using stickers can create "dot bias", whereby the most popular ideas collect extra votes, because participants don't want to "waste" their vote by being the only dot on an idea. However, its important that you record those ideas that only collect one or two votes. These ideas might warrant a second look while the ideas that get no votes likely don't have much merit. In order to avoid "dot bias" have the participants write down the three ideas that they like best and turn those votes over to the facilitator for scoring.

Once the ideas are curated and voted on the ideation session is officially over. Be sure to thank the participants for their time and effort. It's also nice to explain what your next steps are, such as, concept development, concept testing, and concept scoring. Participants can then go home or return to work.

You may want to keep a small core team of marketing, engineering, and industrial design folks behind to further refine some of the most popular ideas while things are still fresh in their minds. This will give you a head-start when it comes to writing concepts. You run the risk of losing some of the nuance of the ideas if you wait too long after the event to refine them. This is why doing the refinements right after the event can be very helpful.