Category: Brainstorming and Ideation

Try the ‘Only we can…..’ exercise. What is unique about your business?

Here is a simple exercise which I would recommend as a source of innovation ideas.  Gather some of your people together and write the following phrase at the top of a flipchart, ‘Only we can………’ Each member of the group then has to complete the sentence. They might describe anything from a product, a service, a feature, a market segment, a geographic area, a personality,... Read More--

Break the Rules – Innovation Technique

Innovators are rule breakers. We often see how new entrants to a market break the rules to which that the existing players conform. The low cost airlines did this when they challenged the ways in which the major airlines did business. The new players used electronic tickets, bypassed travel agents, did away with allocated seating, flew to new smaller airports and so on. Break the Rules is a workshop... Read More--

Try Freewriting, a creativity method for groups or individuals

Freewriting is a personal creativity technique that is particularly useful when you have hit a mental roadblock. You simply write the challenge or topic at the top of a large piece of paper and then start writing. You can write anything related to the topic. Here are the rules of freewriting as given by Natalie Goldberg: Give yourself a time limit. Write for ten minutes say, and then stop. Keep your... Read More--

Use Similes to Generate Fresh Ideas

Similes is a powerful and effective group brainstorming method. You state the challenge and then get everyone to write down on their own sheet of paper – ‘Our problem is like…’ Each person then completes the sentence. They must do this in silence so that they are not influenced by each other’s ideas. You are looking to find a broadly similar challenge in a completely different... Read More--

SCAMPER is a reliable and effective tool for generating product or service innovations

One of the most reliable and popular methods on my Ideas Workshop is SCAMPER.   It is an effective and versatile technique for generating innovative ideas for your product or service. It forces you to look at your offering from seven different perspectives. SCAMPER is an acronym and you ask the following types of question when you use this tool: SUBSTITUTE – What elements of this product or... Read More--

How to use Six Serving Men as a Problem Analysis Method

Six Serving Men is a team exercise that examines an issue from twelve different viewpoints. It is based on the words of the poem by Rudyard Kipling: I keep six honest serving men, they taught me all I knew. Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who. We probe the topic using these questioning words from a positive and negative perspective. The issue is defined as a question and... Read More--

Ten Great Tips for Trainers

Whatever the subject of your workshop or training course there are some simple steps you can take to make it better for the participants and better for you. Here are a few of them. Agree the objectives. What are the outcomes that the decision maker wants for this workshop or course? You should discuss and agree these in advance. Very often you can help them to decide based on your experiences of... Read More--

How to Evaluate Ideas

Generating a large number of ideas is a key part of the creative thinking process. The more ideas you come up with the more likely you are to find something truly innovative.  But having a long list of ideas creates an issue. How do you select the best ideas to carry through to implementation? Have you ever been in a brainstorm session where you filled flip charts with ideas and then the manager said,... Read More--

What is the Difference between Creativity and Innovation?

Discussions about innovation are often made difficult because people are unclear about the exact meanings of some key terms. In particular there is confusion about the difference between creativity, innovation and invention. Let us start with some definitions: Creativity is the capability or act of conceiving something original or unusual Innovation is the implementation of something new. Invention... Read More--

Get Brilliant Business Ideas from an Innovation Camp

I have facilitated a number of corporate innovation camps for clients. One was for Amdocs, a $3B software and services company that supplies mobile service providers. It took place over four days: the first two were spent on a bewildering variety of crazy creativity activities. These included blowing huge soap bubbles, a giant pacman, wacky physics experiments, lateral thinking puzzles, improv theatre... Read More--