Idea Generation and Innovation Activities

Use Y-box for your New Production Development ideation workshop

Mash-ups is a collaborative idea generation method in which participants come up with innovative concepts by combining different elements together. In a first step, participants brainstorm around different areas, such as technologies, human needs, and existing services. In a second step, they rapidly combine elements from those areas to create new, fun and innovative concepts. Mash-ups demonstrates how fast and easy it can be to come up with innovative ideas.

Use a remote-friendly version of the classic note and vote exercise to generate ideas quickly, vote on the most suitable, and turn them into how might we statements your group can move forward with! 

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. 

Customer experience mapping is a method of documenting and visualizing the experience a customer has as they use the product or service. It also maps out their responses to their experiences.

To be used when there is a solution (even in a conceptual stage) that can be analyzed.

A learning and presentation technique for sharing ideas

A questioning method for generating, explaining, investigating ideas.

The purpose of this simple exercise is to demonstrate three key principles useful for creativity and idea generation: quantity is a condition for quality; building on the ideas of others; the ideas we come up with are usually all the same. The format is simple, with small groups standing and drawing apples. At the end of the exercise, the whole group reflects and draws out learnings and reflections.

Future workshop is a method that aims to have stakeholders design their desired future, avoiding constraints imposed by experts or organizations.

To be used when ideas need to be developed outside of the design team.

This is an exercise to inspire your team with products or services that they think they can use as inspiration for their concepts in the next phases of their design sprints.

Creating a sentence relating to a specific topic or problem with each person contributing one word at a time.

A simple exercise that complements exploratory, discursive, and creative workshops with insights and opinions from outside. Use this exercise when brainstorming ideas, developing a new product or service or creating a strategy or plan that will include others. Participants phone a co-worker and ask them questions relevant to the task. This quickly generates meaningful input from a range of “outside” perspectives. Often, participants will be surprised at how simple it was to solicit this input and how valuable it is to the process.