Idea Generation and Innovation Activities

When people want to develop new ideas, they most often think out of the box in the brainstorming or divergent phase. However, when it comes to convergence, people often end up picking ideas that are most familiar to them. This is called a ‘creative paradox’ or a ‘creadox’.

The How-Now-Wow matrix is an idea selection tool that breaks the creadox by forcing people to weigh each idea on 2 parameters.

The Six Thinking Hats are used by individuals and groups to separate out conflicting styles of thinking. They enable and encourage a group of people to think constructively together in exploring and implementing change, rather than using argument to fight over who is right and who is wrong.

Using multiple digital whiteboards, participants float to different whiteboards to add their thoughts, contributions, or questions. Final whiteboards are discussed and reviewed.

Part of the reason we end up with under-developed ideas is that we stick with the first good idea we have — rather than taking the time to explore complementary approaches. 6-8-5 is designed to combat this pattern by forcing us to generate lots of ideas in a short period of time. The activity can then be repeated to hone & flesh out a few of the best ideas.

 The exercise allows teams to examine multiple aspects of an event or project in order to form original ideas on how it can be enhanced in the future. Break free from the barriers of boring retrospective analysis strategies to discover how you can make your next project, meeting, conference a success.

Build common understanding about culture, customer, future, strategy or next needed steps for a team or organisation based on the Agile Manifesto.

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. 

We live in fast changing world and we need to think and react quickly and decisively. This gamification tool encourages people to think rapidly and creatively. Remove the mental barriers that prevent people from overthinking and blocking in branstormings.

Creativity through pictures and images

Images have the ability to spark insights and to create new associations and possible connections. That is why pictures help generate new ideas, which is exactly the point of this exercise.

A short visual exercise from the Kaos Pilot School.