Idea Generation inspiration

IDEA GENERATION AND INSPIRATION
Finding the spark of inspiration to get your idea generation sessions moving

Introduction

Our previous articles have described the idea generation process, what makes a good brainstorming session, which steps to take, and how to select the best team of participants.

If you have the right team for idea generation and a clear process to follow, the ideas may form organically.

But they may not. You can spend a lot of time staring blankly at post-its on a board and not making any progress.

Idea generation is inspired through increasing the clarity of the supporting information and creating new frames of reference and ways of looking at that information

In this article we will explore methods to divide your objective into smaller concepts and ways to find new perspectives that will inspire innovation and idea generation.

Exploring inspiration

The most effective tools for inspiration fall into three categories based on the nature of the objective of your idea generation session.

The first category is when your objective statement is exploring a journey. This might be the journey a potential customer takes before selecting your product, the user experience as they move forward with your product, or it might be a process that is being followed by either the product or a group of people.

The second category is when your objective statement is looking to understand a specific situation. This might be adding definition to a customer or market, understanding a product function or failure, or looking to add more detail to an event.

The third category is when you have a well-defined problem and your objective is to find solutions. This will often be a follow-on from the first two categories but may be a search for a solution to a stand-alone problem.

Here, we will focus on the first category where the situation you are looking at is changing with time.

Exploring a journey

If your objective statement describes a journey, you can look at it in terms of the end goal, the start point, and the detail of the steps taken between the two.

Often you will start at the outcome; if you know what end point look like, it acts as a reference point for the rest of the process. You can then walk backwards through the journey, adding in steps, until you reach the start point. Alternatively, you may choose to start from the beginning and walk the journey through to the end.

There is no single answer for which direction is best, this will depend on the process being explored, the nature of the problem, and the knowledge of the team involved. Regardless of the direction is taken, it is important to ensure that you are structured and are constantly checking that the exploration does not diverge from the main objective.

You shouldn’t expect to get this right first time and may end up going backwards and forwards or circling individual stages. It is important to remember that there are two objectives here. You are looking to define the journey, but your main goal is to provide inspiration for ideas; this is more likely to happen during the discussions as the participants examine concepts and make connections between them.

You may be able to start with defined process documents, but don’t fall into the trap of assuming that the process you have documented is the process as it is followed. You will need to ensure that everyone feels free to discuss where they take shortcuts or don’t follow instructions; the key here is to understand the reasons why so that you can identify improvements.

You will need to apply judgment on how much detail to add at each stage: creating too much information is not an effective use of the of the time and opportunity of your idea session, but also reduces the team’s ability to identify and follow up on connections. If you find that there are too many steps for the team to explore, you should narrow the scope for your session so that it is achievable. Anything removed must be recorded ready for any follow up that may happen.

If you don’t have the processes already defined, you will have to create a new map.

Many operational process can be mapped taking the role of the subject of the process and walking through the steps taken. It may be a product moving through a manufacturing process, a customer walking through a service event, or information moving through software code.

Some journeys are a little more abstract and will need to be built around general principles such as customer or user decision paths.

The Customer Decision Journey

There are a number of steps that a customer follows around the selection and purchase of your product or service. A review of this journey can help identify opportunities to improve engagement with the customer at each of these steps

Need recognition – You will need to understand which customer need you are looking to address with your product. Once you have this, you can identify when and why the customer is motivated to find a way to meet this need
Information Search – Where do they look for information, how do they identify what the alternatives are
Evaluation of alternatives – What are their criteria for selection of a solutions, how do they compare the alternatives
Purchase Decision – what does the journey from the final decision to actual process look like. How does this this change how they feel about the product
Post Purchase – what does their experience using the product look like, what are your interactions with the customer post-purchase, will they come back to you for follow up purchases or upgrades, will they advocate for your product or brand.

The User Journey

Once a customer has selected your product or service, you can map out the journey they take as a user to ensure that you are supporting them and their needs

Trial – software may have a free trial version or products may have a trial period post purchase when a customer can return the product if not satisfied
Normal use – the user may move into a standard subscription model or may using a product or service in its standard form.
Further purchases – you may offer further upgrades for the product, or the customer may need service and spares support
Premium service – you have further service levels that you want to move the customer to, perhaps higher subscription models, service plans, or upgrades.
Renewal – When the current software, product, or service is due for replacement, will your customers renew with you

Defining a New Journey

These are examples, and you will probably find that your actual process maps out differently and evolves during the session.

When mapping out a new process or adapting an existing one, you will start by thinking through what the start and finish look like. The process is taking multiple inputs and converting them into outputs. Some of these outputs are intended, including any planned waste, and some are unintended such as errors or scrap parts.

You will then identify the tasks involved in the process and sort them into a sequence. This sequence will be defined by dependencies: some tasks will be reliant on the outcome of a predecessor, others could be carried out on parallel paths.

You should also consider the different workstreams. There may be multiple teams involved and you will need to understand the hand off processes between them.

Once you have the general outline of the process, it is time to look in detail at the individual steps.

Describing the steps

The best starting point for reviewing a process step is with its planned outcome. If you build an understanding of the outputs, you will be able to measure all other factors against the contribution they make to the desired output of the process step.

You can populate these outputs with suggestions from the participants. These will not be limited to just the expected outputs, but you should also identify all the ways that the process results in an unplanned output.

This will lead to being able to describe what should happen within the process step. There are three key questions to ask about what is happening inside the process step:

What should happen and does
What should happen and doesn’t
What shouldn’t happen but does

You can now move further backwards in time and ask these same three questions about the inputs to the process.

When you consider the things that shouldn’t happen but do, you can expand out to consider the influences from outside of the process step. The four most common negative influences on a process step are:

Variation – the inputs or outputs change in an uncontrolled way, or there is a different product or customer moving through the process

Degradation – tools wear, people get tired, a marketing message becomes overused or loses relevance to the segment, products degrade while being stored or used
Environmental changes – products being used in different locations or market segments, teams responsible for customers in new segments, societal changes
Customer and interactions – customer misuses the product either accidentally or wilfully, customers misunderstand or ignore instructions, marketing messages are not recognized in their target segment, negative reviews or brand associations.

All process steps have control factors that will hopefully prevent most of these things from happening. You may have process guides, tests, or training that influences the output.

Once you have all these elements laid out, the team can brainstorm the relationships between the elements:

Are all the inputs available, are there any not needed.
Is the process suitably protected against all the things that could go wrong.
What happens to the unplanned outputs, are they captured before they move to the next step of the process.

Once the different categories have been populated with ideas, you can spend some time looking at the links between them. Some controls may be a response to specific causes for error. Some of the unplanned outputs may be a direct result from not having this control.

Building the journey

You can now build a more complete view of the overall process by mapping all steps together from start to finish.

The overall result of the process will fall into one of three possible outcomes. You may have an ideal output, or a completely unacceptable result; between the two though, the is a range of results that are not ideal but are acceptable.

With the steps mapped out in this way, you can look at whether there are process interventions that can be made to move the output of an individual step or process path to a more acceptable outcome.

You may also find that there are opportunities to introduce stop points, that halt a process before it becomes unacceptable, saving the resource expenditure that would have otherwise been wasted.

The idea generation process is not linear, and changes from case to case. You may find that it makes sense to fill out the boxes with ideas as you go, you may find that you follow a particular line of thought through each of the stages from input to output pulling in all the sources of error and control as you go. You may go start to finish or finish to start.

It is likely that you will follow more that one of these approaches, and while you may have expectations for which would work best, you should be prepared to adjust to the approach that evolves within the group

For more information

IDEA GENERATION AND INSPIRATION Finding the spark of inspiration to get your idea generation sessions moving