Olivier Toubia is doing some very interesting research in the field of ideation.
Idea generation (ideation) is critical to the design and marketing of
new products, to marketing strategy, and to the creation of effective
advertising copy. However, there has been relatively little formal
research on the underlying incentives with which to encourage
participants to focus their energies on relevant and novel ideas.
Several problems have been identified with traditional ideation
methods. For example, participants often free ride on other
participants’ efforts because rewards are typically based on the
group-level output of ideation sessions.
As I see it his study is HIGHLY relevant in qualifying the right ideas at the fuzzy frontend. Do you have any ideas, any experience about ideation processes from your own practice? Good/bad things? Methods? Incentives? Please share?
2 comments so far
Very interesting and needed work! We are at the infant stage of development in really understanding ideation. For example, the best advice people can give is “think out of the box!” and “go for quantity!” Yet, if you look at teams that ideate well, they are definitely doing something more and better than this. Professor Toubia’s work is an excellent start in this area that will begin to benefit innovative organizations as the implications are understood.
In my perspective the problem of “thinking out of the box” is kind of the same as “don’t think about a pink elephant” - and the only thing you can think of is a pink elephant… or the box the box the box. To get our brains and creativity going I believe it is important to outline some kind of a horison on which to generate ideas - this can be formed by futurologists telling stories about possible future scenarios, storyboarding on scenarios or situations, or outlining some kind of utopia picture on where we want to go.