The Idea Generation Machine: Strategies for Transforming Your Ideation Sessions
Great products need incredible ideas. Every single startup, industry disruptor, and technology advancement has stemmed from a great idea. Get idea generation right, and you’ll be well-equipped to up-level your product—and then level it up again and again.
But great ideas don’t just come from nowhere. Learning the ins and outs of the idea generation process, effective mind mapping and brainstorming techniques, and how to rearrange a group of great ideas into a cohesive and lucrative product concept takes time and practice.
So let’s get started!
What Is Idea Generation?
Idea generation is the process of coming up with ideas that will contribute to your team’s goals. It’s the first step in the idea management process, which is also commonly referred to as ‘ideation’. Idea generation involves working with cross-functional teams and stakeholders to outline innovative concepts for new products, product enhancements, new features, and functionalities, or other added-value offerings for your customers.
Why Is Idea Generation Important?
Ideas are what keep companies ahead of their competitors, allowing product teams to find innovative ways to solve customer problems and differentiate their services. Every startup begins with an idea that entrepreneurs need to tweak and refine to find market fit. The product development process requires new ideas and ways to enhance the experience, to bring the best ideas to market.
Without ideas, companies remain stagnant and fall behind the change curve. The best businesses find ways to keep reinventing themselves, latching on to new technologies and customer trends to remain relevant and create new growth streams.
Idea generation is arguably the most important aspect of idea management to drive company innovation. Without generating incredible ideas at the start of the process, it will be difficult to successfully validate and launch concepts.
Background: The Origins of Idea Generation
Ideation as a concept has been around for over 200 years, with the first record of the word ‘ideation’ being used as a noun dating back to 1818. The written use of the term grew in popularity from 1980 onwards, strongly correlated with the technology revolution. It has continued to be popular as technology companies advance faster than ever, generating new ideas to transform consumers' lives.
Idea Generation Examples
It’s a well-known fact that our best ideas don’t come to us from sitting at our desks. In fact, a lot of the most successful real-life examples of new ideas being implemented stem from people’s own experiences and desire to drive change. Idea generation often starts from adapting something that we already know about, and applying it to a new scenario or attempting to advance it.
Co-creating ideas with employees at Orange
In 2007, Telecom company Orange opened up a suggestion box to encourage employees to submit their ideas for improving processes. By 2010, the suggestion box had received more than 93,000 ideas, and over 7,500 projects were implemented! This generated the company more than €600 million in earnings or savings.
Airbnb began with their founder's opportunity
Airbnb was sparked by the founders’ idea that they could pay their rent by hosting conference attendees on air mattresses in their apartments. This idea evolved into a company that’s now worth $113 billion, and has a 20%+ market share in the vacation rental industry.
Borrowing ideas from a different industry at Ford
The introduction of the assembly line in Ford was modeled from a different industry altogether, the ‘disassembly line’ used in abattoirs. This idea was generated from cross-industry thinking and reduced the time it took to assemble a car from 12 hours to 93 minutes, transforming the way production was handled.
Benefits Of Using Idea Generation Strategies
Idea generation techniques and strategies are frameworks that teams use to come up with a lot of ideas based on a problem or goal. These might include structures (often outlined with an acronym) for brainstorming sessions and asynchronous idea generation practices. Using idea generation strategies offers two main benefits:
1. They help generate high-quality ideas so that products can grow and add impact to the bottom-line of a company.
Idea generation methods provide a template for teams to generate the best ideas. They create a dedicated space to think, and ways to facilitate this. They allow you to break away from the details and enter a new, more creative headspace.
2. They are an incredible way to bring stakeholders together and empower a team to succeed.
Most ideation strategies involve cross-team collaboration, and co-creating with employees. When idea generation is collaborative it brings in a diversity in knowledge and viewpoints, allowing teams to actually generate the best solution for their wider target audience.
Not only does this generate better ideas, but it also leads to lasting benefits in a team, like:
- Increased expertise
- Improved productivity
- Lower absenteeism
- Increased likelihood of teams performing at their peak
Having idea generation techniques in place make it a lot easier for PMs to manage the ideation process effectively. It allows you to follow a clear process that everyone understands, and get the right ideas out of people. The right strategies allow even the quietest people on a team to share their valuable opinions. Without these strategies, what could start as an idea generation session could quickly turn into chaos.
4 Common Idea Generation Challenges
Coming up with the next great idea isn’t always easy. Here are a few common challenges teams face in the idea generation phase:
1. Lack of creativity in idea generation
Most people’s best creative thinking isn’t done in a constrained time period or environment. Ideas can come from so many angles, and are often inspired by another solution, or by having a clear mind. Some ways to overcome this are:
- Encouraging people to think about problem-solving in advance of a dedicated idea generation session
- Using effective icebreakers at the start of a brainstorming session
- Implementing continuous ideation techniques, where ideas can be raised at any time.
2. Not enough focus
A lot of teams also make the common mistake of becoming side-tracked in their idea generation. If it isn’t focused enough, people can end up generating ideas that won’t actually advance new initiatives or support business objectives. You can avoid this trap by:
- Setting clear goals for what you’re ideating about
- Presenting everyone with the same insights and knowledge beforehand
- Making sure these objectives and insights are clear at the beginning of any ideation session
3. Preventing ideas before they’re fully formed
People have a tendency to see the limitations of a concept and believe that something won’t work. We can be quick to shut down ideas that go against our initial beliefs, or we think might be too much of a challenge. This often stops an idea in its tracks instead of expanding on it and generating ideas that might work. Ways to overcome this challenge include:
- Prompting idea generation with ‘How might we...’
- Intercepting idea shut-downs when they happen, and encouraging the team to explore what’s possible
- Trying a ‘worst idea’ approach to help alleviate fear of judgment and encourage team members to think critically about how to improve bad ideas
4. Challenges with collaborative ideation
It can also be hard to facilitate collaborative ideation. Often in group settings some people have stronger opinions than others and end up dominating the session. You also need to be careful not to fall into the trap of groupthink, where people make poor-quality decisions as they try not to stray too far from the group.
These behaviors typically limit the quality of ideas and don’t allow teams to think creatively enough to generate new concepts. You can work against this challenge by:
- Having a creative process for generating ideas and strong facilitation practices
- Creating psychological safety so everyone feels like they can share their thinking and work to the best results
- Going round-robin style with a time allowance for each and every person to share their idea
Types of Idea Generation
There are several different ways to run effective idea generation sessions. Factors like how much time you have, how many people you want to get together, and exactly what the goal is for your ideation will influence the type of idea generation that you choose to progress with.
Suggestion schemes
Suggestion schemes are an evergreen approach to idea generation. They typically involve colleagues providing suggestions to make improvements based on their observations. These ideas can lead to internal efficiency improvements or improvements to customer value.
Orange generating €600 million in earnings or savings (highlighted in the examples above) is a great example of this. Nestlé also took a similar approach with InGenius, engaging more than 65,000 employees and 7,000 ideas.
All it takes to create a suggestion scheme is having a place where employees can send ideas, and generate awareness of the scheme across the company. Rewarding employees for submitting ideas and highlighting successful examples encourages them to join in.
Co-creation with customers
Instead of just sourcing ideas internally, you can also get your customers to input ideas. Xiaomi used their community to exchange knowledge, gain insights on technology, and share their opinions on the latest gadgets.
Unilever created its ‘Open Innovation platform’, sharing challenges with the public for which individuals could submit ideas. They gained over 1,000 suggestions in 6 months.
Loom has a trello board for customers to suggest feature enhancements and vote on priorities, so they can directly gather customer insight.
With social media, focus groups, and easy-use tools like Trello, it’s easier than ever to gather real-time customer feedback and facilitate open-source idea generation to grow a new product that your customers love.
Hackathons
Hackathons are an incredible way to get a large range of people together to generate big ideas quickly. These can work incredibly well in the product management and engineering space.
A hackathon typically involves teams taking between 2-5 days away from their ‘day-to-day’ work to solve a new problem. The best Hackathons have some constraints like the outcome to achieve, or a particular problem to solve. Teams will generate ideas that they think will work in that space, and then generate a solution through the Hackathon. Teams are usually formed from people that don’t typically work together, adding a lot of cross-collaboration benefits.
Zapier came to life through a hackathon at Startup Weekend, which shows the power of working through an idea with focus in a short space of time.
Internal workshops
Workshops are another great way to gather ideas for areas that you need to focus on quickly. They work the best for new opportunities or specific problem spaces and can be a great way to bring people together.
For workshops to offer the most value, it can be helpful to have an ideation or design framework to use to help people to generate ideas and think about problems in a different way. Here are a few frameworks and ideation techniques you can try:
“How Might We”
These sessions help teams think about possible ways to solve different problems. These sessions work best when there is a clear goal and focus. At the beginning of the session, different people in the team can present data and insight on a particular problem space. Each member of the team then writes down ‘How might we’ statements to establish problems that they could solve.
For example, if data is presented to show a drop-off on the website search form, the How Might We statement would say ‘How might we reduce search form drop-off by 4%’. Then once the how might we statements are gathered, you select the biggest problems to solve, and the team can start to generate ideas for ways that you could improve that result.
Thinking hats
The concept is that different people will wear different ‘hats’ for role-playing, encouraging them to think in a different way. Each coloured hat requires you to think from different angles. Green hats generate ideas, while other members of the team play different roles to expand and evolve on these concepts. For example, a red hat could represent caution and risks, and a pink hat could represent potential and ideals.
This approach means that everyone gets a chance to think from a new perspective, and it really can help you to tease out existing ideas by evolving them.
Lateral Thinking
This is a broader technique used to get people to think beyond their normal viewpoint and into a wider range. Thinking hats is a technique that is used to encourage lateral thinking, but other approaches can also be used. For example, encourage reverse thinking by working backward from an ideal outcome.
You could look at what is being done in other industries and use this for inspiration, you can imagine there are no constraints and design the most creative solutions, you could assess what you could do in 50 years time to solve this problem. The key is to unblock current thought limitations for effective idea generation.
Crazy 8s
This simple technique requires team members to sketch out 8 different ideas in 8 minutes. Rapid thinking means you need to move quickly and explore different options, and everyone can participate. I find this technique helpful to get people used to generating ideas and creating a visual representation of them, but most of the value comes from then expanding on strong concepts.
Brainwriting
In this exercise, each person writes down 3 ideas relating to the opportunity space. After 5 minutes, you stop and pass the piece of paper to the next person. They then write down 3 more ideas. This approach allows team members to trigger each others’ thinking and come up with a wider range of ideas while avoiding groupthink from thinking out loud.
Making it Your Own
All of these ideation techniques can be combined to get the best ideas out of your team. The key to all of these is to:
- Have a clear focus for the session
- Make sure your timings are organized
- Ensure that your participants share the same info and insight before you start
The idea is to take a divergent approach before converging ideas. You can then prioritize the ideas that would add the most impact, expanding on these if needed.
These sessions do not need to be used to decide exactly what to build, but instead should be used to bring a range of opinions together and get your stakeholders excited by the possibilities of what you could achieve.
How To Create Idea Generation Systems
Idea generation systems allow you to put processes in place to continuously develop innovative ideas. The best idea generation systems use a combination of approaches to ensure a constant stream of new ideas and ways of thinking is in place. Here are some idea generation systems you can implement on product teams:
Evergreen ideation systems
If you implement suggestion schemes or co-creation methods with customers, review the insights that come from them on a regular basis. You want to assess whether any of these ideas could contribute towards your team and company goals, and prioritize the best ones to move forward with.
If you choose to refine and implement an idea, share this insight with the people that suggested it to boost their engagement, especially if you see good results.
Regular Hackathons
A lot of tech companies run Hackathons on an annual, semi-annual, or quarterly basis to bring the company together and give everyone a well-earned break from their day to day work. Incredible ideas could be sparked, and if they are, it’s important to keep momentum and see these through to implementation.
Clear discovery and ideation processes
In product teams it’s important to continuously run through ideation processes as part of your discovery work. If a product team is outcome-focused, they should understand the problem space, and then generate ideas to solve this each time they shift focus.
Every time a team launches and tests something, they will gain new insights. These new insights can be used to form the next set of ideas, generating a natural, ongoing cycle of ideation.
Idea Generation Tools to Try
There are a ton of software tools available to support your idea generation and overall ideation processes. Our top idea management software picks are a great place to start your research and get a sense of the market.
Idea Generation Best Practices
Here are a few tips and best practices to keep in mind for your idea generation processes:
- Always start with a clear outcome and focus
- Gather insights and data before you begin generating ideas as a team
- Use insights and data to help you to prioritize evergreen ideas that relate to your goals
- Make sure everyone is on the same page by setting clear goals and objectives
- Encourage everyone to participate to diversify ideas
- Use a range of techniques to get the best ideas from people
- Encourage thinking time away from the desk to come up with new ways to solve a problem
- Follow a clear process to run effective ideation workshops
Join For More Idea Generation Insights
Don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter for more product management resources and guides, plus the latest podcasts, interviews, and other insights from industry leaders and experts.
