100 Ideas that Show Up in Every Ideation Session
Your Shortcut to the ‘Other Side of Obvious’
Did you ever feel like in some ideation sessions it takes a lot of effort to come up with the same, ‘obvious’ ideas? I know I have, and that I’d love to have a faster way to get to the ‘other side of obvious’. The following anecdote often plays through my mind when doing ideation sessions with startups or corporates.
A number of years ago, I worked in computer games. One day, I visited the concept art department, and found a concept artist sitting in the middle of a pile of discarded drawings, furiously sketching more character designs.
Intrigued, I, asked him what he was doing and why he threw away some pretty awesome drawings. The artist answered that he was throwing away the first hundred or so ideas because they wouldn’t be original.
To come up with something really new, he learned he had to work through all the associations and ideas that were obvious, that anyone could come up with, first — and throw them away.
So to speed up ideation sessions, I did the obvious and made a list.
Now, of course, a lot can be said (and I did, in this post) for throwing out any and all associations during ideation: ‘Obvious’ or ‘bad’ ideas are needed as stepping stones for your brain to get better ideas. Therefore, simply putting up a list of ‘obvious ideas’ by itself won’t do much good to spark your imagination.
To get the most out of this list, use it in one of these ways:
- Use it to spark ideas. Encourage people to make new combinations with tried (tired?) ingredients. The energy saved by coming up with ‘it’s a platform!’ for the millionth time can be used to define how that platform is unique or mashing it up with something else to make a unique combination. Tip: creating random combinations can really spark creativity here!
- Use it as a checklist after (or halfway through) the session. Did you cover all the bases? Are there ingredients you haven’t combined yet?
- Use it as a quality check. Is that idea that everyone gets behind popular because it is ‘obvious’? Or is it really fresh?
Especially when you’re working with a group that is not used to ideate together, and is not used to work as a team in that setting, subliminal uncertainty may influence members to choose the more ‘obvious’, easier to grasp ideas and become excited about them — simply because they feel ‘safe’ enough to understand for the entire group to get behind.
Use the list of ideas to label ‘obvious’ ideas as the ones that may need more work and TLC to be innovative or clear enough to count as a really great ideation result. Doing that can help the team focus and go the steps beyond restating the obvious.
I’d like to share the first 100 ideas of my list. It’s a random mix of product ideas, business model patterns, revenue models, and more. It is of course far from complete, and I encourage you to build on it for your own ideation sessions.
Happy ideating!
