Idea Generation and Innovation Activities

With this facilitation technique you can immediately include everyone regardless of how large the group is. You can generate better ideas and more of them faster than ever before. You can tap the know-how and imagination that is distributed widely in places not known in advance.

Open, generative conversation unfolds. Ideas and solutions are sifted in rapid fashion. Most importantly, participants own the ideas, so follow-up and implementation is simplified. No buy-in strategies needed! Simple and elegant!

This is a great facilitation technique to answer open questions of trainees with a "What if" learning style. It prevents the facilitator from answering all questions herself. With this method trainees can: 

• close knowledge gaps
• find solutions for personal problems
• imagine themselves using their new knowledge in future and prepare themselves for obstacles
  

Open Space is a methodology for large groups to create their agenda discerning important topics for discussion, suitable for conferences, community gatherings and whole system facilitation

DADs make it easy for a group or community to discover practices and behaviors that enable some individuals (without access to special resources and facing the same constraints) to find better solutions than their peers to common problems. These are called positive deviant (PD) behaviors and practices. DADs make it possible for people in the group, unit, or community to discover by themselves these PD practices.

DADs also create favorable conditions for stimulating participants’ creativity in spaces where they can feel safe to invent new and more effective practices. Resistance to change evaporates as participants are unleashed to choose freely which practices they will adopt or try and which problems they will tackle. DADs make it possible to achieve frontline ownership of solutions.

A lateral thinking approach for ideas to a difficult problem

A virtual asynchronous start for an issues or problem solving workshop.

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.

Creativity through pictures and images

When people must tackle a common complex challenge, you can release their inherent creativity and leadership as well as their capacity to self-organize.

Open Space makes it possible to include everybody in constructing agendas and addressing issues that are important to them. Having co-created the agenda and free to follow their passion, people will take responsibility very quickly for solving problems and moving into action. Letting go of central control (i.e., the agenda and assignments) and putting it in the hands of all the participants generates commitment, action, innovation, and follow-through. You can use Open Space with groups as large as a couple of thousand people!

Ideation and Concept Development is a process for groups to work creatively and collaboratively to generate creative ideas. It’s a general approach that can be adapted and customized to suit many different scenarios. It includes basic principles for idea generation and several steps for groups to work with. It also includes steps for idea selection and development.

Five Ideas is an activity that encourages participants to go beyond what is good for their team or their department and work on cooperatively achieving common goals.

Teambuilding activities create high-performance teams whose members are extremely loyal to each other and to their team. Sometimes, however, the emphasis in teamwork results in reduced collaboration across teams. Similar problems occur when employees become so focused on their departmental goals that they ignore or downplay the strategic goals for the total organization.

A problem solving technique to define a problem, challenge or opportunity and to generate ideas.