Idea Generation

Innovation is based on ideas. They’re usually new ideas and they can be about new things, techniques or services. Ideas can be born in a “Eureka Moment” or slowly and painstakingly formed. Sometimes they turn into products that make it to market. Sometimes they don’t. Ideas are wonderful but they’re worthless unless they support an invoice.

We believe that idea generation needs to be properly managed and planned. Waiting for a random moment of inspiration is too risky.  We organise idea generation sessions that encourage and teach creativity and lateral thinking. These sessions produce a large number of ideas or concepts. We work hard to ensure that the concepts are built as complete propositions so they can be screened and improved before they are turned into products.

Clients often refer to idea generation as ‘brainstorming’. This has a role to play but it runs the risk of being haphazard. There is much more to true creativity than that. We prefer to call this stage “Serious Creativity”. It’s a well-planned process that includes brainstorming and much more. It’s hard work, productive, well thought through and fun.

We will work with you before a “Serious Creativity” workshop to design the event and plan the crucial input sessions. Input sessions are short introductions to key topics, delivered in ways that encourage ideas and insights to form in the minds of the workshop’s participants.  When ideas start to form they are captured and written or drawn as “fragments” that are displayed around the room. The room is a valuable resource so the layout and facilities specification are important. As fragments are developed we enable people to get into a creative frame of mind which stimulates more idea generation. When we have collected a good supply of ideas we start to build the concepts. These become the workshop’s output.  

We usually generate around 50 concepts in template form. They are enhanced with illustrations and creative writing input from our associates. Why so many? Because as Noble prize winner Linus Pauling wrote, “The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones away”.

For more information on how we can help at the idea generation stage, see the Toolkit, contact us by email or call us on 0203 286 3051.