Idea Generation and Innovation Activities

Simple, classic brainstorming with two variants. Popcorn - where participants speak out-loud and Round Robin - where participants work in silence and pass their ideas to the next person in turn. 

You can use the Draw Toast exercise to introduce people to the concepts of visual thinking, working memory, mental models and/or systems thinking.

This also works as a nice warm-up exercise to get people engaged with each other and thinking visually. Plus, it’s fun!

A fast and loud method to enhance brainstorming within a team. Since this activity has more than round ideas that are repetitive can be ruled out leaving more creative and innovative answers to the challenge.

At IDEO.org we have seven little rules that unlock the creative power of a brainstorming session.

Brainwriting is essentially the same as brainstorming. Ideas are generated by asking people to write them down instead of verbally presenting them.

A mind map is a diagram used to represent a number of ideas or things. Mind maps are methods for analyzing information and relationships.

A group idea-generation and ice-melter activity.

Use Y-box for your New Production Development ideation workshop

Use Craig Raine's poem A Martian Sends a Postcard Home to spur creative thinking and encourage perspective shifting in a group. After a warm-up, you can then use this martian perspective to describe your product or service and gain new insights and ideas.

Observing the lives of others is not only an essential element of how we define our own identities, it can also be a great spark for creativity. This activity was inspired by a blog post by Russell Davies.

This specific activity is perfect both for honing your listening and observation skills, but also how to turn this into an everyday documentary-style output. Oh and by the way, he does warn that this activity should be done with a certain level of sensitivity to the subjects you are observing.

One of the best ways to explore creativity is through building. Simple low fidelity prototypes can allow us to transform simple (and at times complex) ideas into something physical. In doing so we inevitably open a space for continuing to explore, reevaluate and iterate.

Creativity is connecting things. If you are looking to give your creative mind a workout with a simple concept mash-up, look no further. The more you do this, the better you’ll get at one of the fundamental skills that lead to new ideas, combining elements. We've found a simple online tool from Dave Birss that helps you to define random objects that can form the basis of your creative combination.