Posted by Kevin Dona on Tuesday, 09 May 2017 in Agile Research Methods

How to Strengthen the Ideation Process and Improve Brainstorming: A Webinar

In today’s fast paced, high stakes business environment, where budgets are tighter than ever, finding the time and dedicating the resources needed for generating breakthrough product ideas can be very challenging. Many companies we’ve worked with either have no process in place or rely on internal brainstorming to come up with their next product ideas.

As we know, brainstorming sessions often include a variety of stakeholders. Our academic colleague, Jacob Goldenberg, points out in his book “Inside the Box,” that a better approach to coming up with new ideas is to brainstorm on your own independently, and then bring ideas to the drawing board anonymously for further discussion and feedback.

In addition, while ideation brainstorming sessions often draw upon a wealth of information and trends accumulated via various types of past research, it is difficult to come up with product ideas that are truly new. Thus, most efforts result in close-in modifications or adaptations to existing offers.

However, there are some key advantages to such a process as well. Likely, the most important of those is early stakeholder engagement. Having the team onboard early and throughout the process certainly increases your odds of success, and those odds increase even more when consumers are also included early in the process.

Traditionally, early ideation processes include rounds of qualitative and iterative discussions which can take quite a bit of time on top of the mounting costs for facilities, moderators, travel, etc.

In our recent webinar entitled, How to Strengthen Your Ideation Process, we suggest an efficient, more agile approach to ideation that blends with your process without adding time, or that helps you to put a process in place if you currently don’t have one. In addition, since this process employs offerings from our agile suite, it can be implemented at a relatively low cost (generally under $25k).

In the webinar, we explore an example of revamping Olympic coverage. While most would never encounter this specific task, many innovation teams have struggled with the immense challenge of reviving a dated product or service. How do you come up with ideas that are not simply small logical extensions, but with ideas that more deeply engage consumers, enhance their user experience or open up new revenue streams?And more importantly, how do you do this without long delays in introducing new offers and without breaking the bank?

Watch the 25-minute webinar for our perspective, and don't hesitate to contact me to share your perspective on ideation. I'd love to continue the discussion.

Comments

Maria Panizo Tuesday, 16 May 2017

Liked your webinar very much. To collect consumer feedback what would you say are the most efficient ways of doing it?

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Kevin Dona Thursday, 18 May 2017

I am glad that you liked the webinar!

The most efficient way somewhat depends on how you define “efficient” and the end purpose of the information. The latter is very important in the overall method, but also the details of the approach.

The approach we suggest in the webinar for generating ideas is our Idea Mill process. We want people to not only give an answer, but to think about their answer. Incenting people to participate often leads to very short answers when collecting feedback online and in volume. Therefore, Idea Mill incents people, via our SmartIncentives, to want to win by providing the best answer. This chance to win is what drives many to give more thoughtful answers while not adding significant cost.

Please feel free to reach out to me directly as well if you would like to discuss further.

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How to Strengthen the Ideation Process and Improve Brainstorming: A Webinar

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