What you’ll learn
- Why good ideas get lost in normal meetings, and Osborn's four rules that protect them
- Six ways to generate ideas, each with an example, and when to use each one
- How to run brainstorming, brainwriting 6-3-5, SCAMPER, TRIZ, morphological analysis and biomimicry on real functions
What you’ll produce
By the end of this module you’ll have a list of ideas, each tagged with the function it serves. Free templates:
From the module
The most fragile moment in the whole job plan
You have just finished Phase 2. You know exactly which functions cost too much: the kettle's "indicate status" function costs £0.60 and is worth £0.15. Now comes the question the whole study exists for: "how else could we do this?" New ideas are fragile. They arrive weak, half-formed and easy to kill. A raised eyebrow or a quick "we tried that in 2019" is enough to kill a new idea. If the boss speaks first, everyone else's ideas start to follow theirs. The Creative phase isn't about being talented. It's about creating a safe space where fragile ideas last long enough to develop.
One more mindset shift before the techniques: you are not looking for the answer. A strong workshop produces 200–400 raw ideas, and only about one in eight survives evaluation. That's normal. If you want 25 ideas to take into development, you need about 200 raw ideas to start with, and fewer than that will reach production. The more ideas you start with, the more good ones survive, and every technique in this module is simply a different way of producing lots of ideas.
Short narrated video in this module
Continue reading in Module 5, or read the related guide: Idea-Generation Techniques.