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What Is Ideation?
Let me explain ideation directly to you: it's the process where I, or anyone, develops and shares prescriptive ideas with others, usually in a business context. This covers the full sequence of thoughts from the initial concept right through to actual implementation. These ideas can come from your past or current knowledge, external influences, opinions, convictions, or principles. You can express ideation in graphical, written, or verbal forms.
How Ideation Works
Simply put, ideation is the act of forming ideas, starting from their conception and moving to real-world application and implementation. Ideas can come from anyone connected to a business or organization, whether you're a low-level employee, manager, customer, partner, or stakeholder. These ideas often result from brainstorming sessions, online forums, seminars, team-building exercises, surveys, and social media platforms.
Ideation is a critical part of any successful business. Take Google in its early days: they encouraged employees to spend up to 20% of their work hours thinking about new ideas that interested them and could solve real problems. As the company grew, this practice diminished. The focus on ideation helps companies innovate or stay competitive by boosting new product launches, customer acquisition, and financial performance.
Here's the key point: if you're spending 100% of your time on job requirements, there's no room to think about new strategies or products for growth or improvement.
The Ideation Process
The ideation process doesn't have to follow a strict model, but there are guidelines you can use to maximize its effectiveness and the solutions it produces.
Ideation doesn't always start with a random thought. Instead, ideas are often reverse-engineered to address emerging problems. So, you need to clearly define the problem first and understand its underlying factors, like industry trends, business environments, customer needs, budget constraints, and other causes of the issue.
Once you've identified key pain points and their root causes, initiate brainstorming sessions and collaborative discussions to crowdsource ideas and generate solutions. These should blend creative and pragmatic thinking, as many problems need both approaches for viable outcomes.
Barriers to ideation include hostile environments, vague goals, closed-minded individuals, groupthink, people-pleasers, ego, inexperienced teams, inability to think outside the box, and pessimism.
These forums must allow open, unrestricted dialogue where participants feel safe to share ideas without fear of ridicule. Embrace all ideas, from academic to fanciful, with equal fairness and open-mindedness.
From the ideas generated, narrow them down to one main idea that can guide future actions. Test it against the problem, adjust as needed, rework, retest, and refine until it's perfected. Then implement it in the real world, and if successful, the process ends.
Styles of Ideation
- Problem solutions: This is a straightforward method where you identify a problem and solve it.
- Derivative ideas: This involves improving an existing idea.
- Symbiotic ideas: This combines several incomplete ideas into a fully developed, holistic one.
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