IDEATION PROCESS

PREPARED BY :SRIJAN KUMAR

What is Ideation?

A fancy word that describes the process of identifying product or service ideas, and turning those ideas into minimum viable products or services.

• Ideation is not about defining solutions – ideation is about thinking and learning.• Ideation is not about brilliant strategies – ideation is about exploration and

direction setting.• Ideation is not about creating advertising tag lines or flashy marketing – ideation

is about understanding customer experiences.

How do people get ideas?

• Just come to them

• Solution to a problem

• Make up the problem and find a solution

• Customer feedback

• Straight up Innovation

4 Step Ideation Process• Gather stimuli

• Multiply stimuli

• Create customer concepts

• Optimize practically

Gather Stimuli (Gather customer insights)• Review customer research reports, analyse competitors, social

trends, lifestyle patterns, and shopping habits. Search blogs, social networks, and customer service records.

• Conduct a number of contextual interviews (in-home, in-office, in-mall) with your target customers to understand their behaviour in an everyday environment.

Multiply Stimuli (Find opportunity areas)• Look for customer pain-points, problems, inefficient processes, or

abnormal behaviour.

• Give these areas names since these themes will serve as vehicles for exploring and developing new ideas.

• Finding opportunities so as to where a particular Idea can be implemented without facing any constraints.

Create Customer Concepts (Brainstorm ideas)• Create actionable design statements around your opportunity areas

like “How might we improve our product delivery times?” or “What can improve our online user experience?”

• Start generating lots of ideas, make sure these ideas are grounded by your customer insights and go for quantity.

• Focus on what concept can be adopted so that when the idea is implemented it can capitalize the market and customers.

Optimize Practically (Prioritize ideas)• Develop some customer criteria like “Does this idea improve

customers lives? "or “Is the idea different from what customers are using today?”

• Focus on business criteria like “Does this idea build on the strengths of our core business model?”

• Help evaluate, rank and select the best ideas. Reconstruction of ideas is also a part of this process.

New Concept Ideation 9

Short-Term Benefits of an Ideation Event:

• Discover/invent new, distinguishable and potentially sustainable solutions to customer problems.

• Discover/invent unrecognized or new customer needs.

• Spread and confirm ideas generated elsewhere.

• Generate enthusiasm -> buy-in -> ownership of new ideas.

New Concept Ideation 10

Long-Term Benefits of an Ideation Event

• Enhance networking among technologists.

• Establish a pan-organization (vs. location-centric) technical community (in large companies).

• Improve employee satisfaction:

• Involvement (having an impact on the Big Picture),

• Security (focus beyond current problems).

• Get low-value ideas off the list once-and-for-all!