The Ideation Process

How to organise an ideation session

In this week’s class we asked Leslie how she sets up an ideation process when working on projects with her clients. There are so many possible approaches and methods that it was very valuable for me to hear what has proven to be a successful approach for her. She suggested a two staged process made of diversion with the purpose to create as many ideas as possible and synthesis to cluster the ideas around strategic ideas and make a choice for further testing. In between there can be either a longer lunch break or it can be continued the next day.

Here is my summary of the process suggested:

Ideation process (based on Crombie, 2019, Illustration by Hinger, 2019)

For our ocean project, we conducted this process in one day with a break between the two parts and in the following I would like to share my learnings from our hands-on trial:

Ideation process with lessons learned (Hinger, 2019)

Facilitation is vital for an efficient and effective ideation process. There should be one facilitating person who guides through the process and provides materials to capture all the ideas. Especially post-its make a difference as they are easy to be reorganised flexibly.

In the diversion part it works very well to put the ideas next to the personas they benefit most, because this clarifies the intended target group of a particular idea. A frequent reminder of the purpose in between the ideation sessions helps to bring everyone on the same page again. When we got stuck in the ideation process, diverse inspirations from the team, e.g. videos or pictures we had seen and other projects in a similar area turned out to be good drivers for new ideas. It would be good if the facilitator prepared this input in case the group itself does not have inspirations to share. At one point in time we started a discussion concerning the pros and cons of one suggestion. A reminder that in this stage no evaluation has yet to be made and creativity should be supported bring everyone back to coming up with more ideas.

The break had a positive impact on our ideation as people took some time to reflect on all the input. By this, new ideas came up. Taking some time to include the new ideas in the ideation wall provides positive new factettes.

The synthesis part leads to two challenges that I relate to the fact that people are emotionally involved with their ideas: In the clustering of ideas to form strategic ideas it happened to us that we got quite excited about one direction for a solution, but only when we reminded ourselves of the purpose of the project, we realised that this idea did not provide a solution to our problem. Therefore, a constant reminder of the purpose can be helpful. Furthermore, when making a choice of ideas to be visualised the discussion can get emotional if people defend their ideas. Here, the method to break the tension have proven to work: either by distracting the discussion shortly by distributing sweets or by summarising the points of view neutrally to bring the discussion to a neutral level again. After the visualisation of strategic ideas trying to combine some aspects in a new way can lead to more innovative solutions.

In our case of the project to raise awareness about the harm of plastic to the environment, especially the ocean and to reduce the consumption of single-use plastic bags, we came up with one idea that we all believed to have most power and passion – a pocket solution for a foldable, reusable bag that ensures that people don’t forget their bags anymore when they go shopping and consequently don’t buy new single-use plastic bags. This idea was supported by the research insight that the reason to buy new single-use bags is forgetting to bring a reusable bag.

Therefore, we went to work on this one idea in detail only, without visualising various proposals.

As Tim Brown (2009, p.15) states in his book Change by Design as part of an example of a product innovation, ‘designers might have ended the project with the [product] itself’, but ‘wholistic design thinkers’ create a whole branding and retailing strategy, addressing all the insights gathered by emphasising with the customers.

Following this mindset, we considered to include some aspects of the other ideas, especially from a marketing campaign solution, e.g. by building a marketing event around the product that we intended to develop.

In an ideal case, we would have visualised more ideas and made a choice after this step as it is risky to go for one ideas straight away. Nevertheless, it seems to me as if the direct choice of a single idea can work out if it has a magic factor that all are convinced of and the solution fits the purpose.

Reference List:

Brown, T. (2009) Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. 1st ed. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.