To be totally honest, I didn’t really know what that was until I ended up at Hyper Island in 2012. In short, it is a creative process where you generate ideas. It’s what most people (including myself pre-Hyper) call brainstorming. I actually don’t know who decided it needed a new name. But whatever.
There are several ideation methods out there and how to chose them is at the end of the day just a matter of personal taste — as well as a bit dependent on what kind of ideas you are looking for. But what people more than often tend to forget, is that you need to chose method(s) according to the people you have in your team. Cause ideation is not as simple as you’d think. Shit can seriously get real and it often to more harm than good if you don’t know how to create a good process around it. Here’s my best advice.
I can’t stress enough the importance of a clear goal. Everything becomes so much easier if you know what you’re trying to achieve. It’s both the way to start as well as the way to finish the ideation process. What I mean with finish, is that the goal is going to help you in the end to choose the final idea. Why? Because the idea has to answer the goal.
#2 Everybody need to take part
One thing that is also very important (and that a lot of people tend to forget) is participation. The whole idea is to build upon each other, thus the participation of all group members is crucial. You will always get the best results when everyone is involved. If not, its just a fucking waste of time.
Drawing and using post-it helps to visualise the idea(s). It also makes it easier and quicker to change and move around. Also to go back to my previous advice, it helps keep everyone present.
Make sure that everybody is heard and instead of shooting down ideas, build on them. Yes, and what do you think of ….
Don’t look for the good ideas to begin with. Here is the one place where it’s actually good to have quantity over quality (at least to begin with). The point is to generate as many ideas as possible so that you in the end have a lot to pick from/work on.
Don’t force it. This is something Alejandro Masferrer wrote about blog post a couple of months ago. If it sucks and you all want to kill each other, just stop. Change method or environment because its not going to get better. So try to feel it and modify as you go and make sure, this is a responsibility everybody has. If it doesn’t work for you, speak up!
If you want to know more about ideation, you can find great tools at The Project of How or Method Kit to test yourself. And if you want to get a deeper understanding of how we work with ideation at The Pop Up Agency, check out or come by for one of our meetups and have a drink. We still have a few seats left for the next academy class.
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