- Time: 8 hours
- Participants: 6-30
- Difficulty: Medium
- Facilitators: 1-2 needed
Objectives
- Use ideation techniques to come up with a large number of innovative new ideas that the team can filter down to the best one(s).
- Inspire participants to think out-of-the-box through disruptive cases, future tech & trends and opposite thinking.
- Practice ideation techniques that can enable the creative process, even beyond this ideation session.
- Encourage participants to present and potential solutions to the group in order to begin a process of change.
When should this session be delivered?
Whenever an innovative solution is needed to move your cause forward, an ideation session is an effective way to enable your group to come up with as many ideas as possible and develop innovative solutions.
Ideation workshops can be applied at various scenarios, such as:
- In the process of developing new services or products
- In the early phases of a project to broaden the perspectives
- Innovating on business strategies
- Finding new angles to solve complex problems
- Any scenario that calls for innovative ideas and potential solutions that go beyond what might have been done before
Innovation projects work best when there is a multi-disciplinary team driving the venture, the same goes for an ideation session.
An effective ideation workshop is one in which diverse voices are present to generate ideas and engage in the process. Try to get a good mix of technical and commercial profiles from different business units in the room. It’s also helpful to ensure that people directly affected by the problem or solution space are among your workshop participants.
In our experience, ideation workshops are especially effective when you face tough problems with no clear solution. By going through a structured ideation process, you and your group can go beyond initial ideas all the way through to solutions that actually solve the issues you’re facing.
Who can facilitate it?
Facilitating an ideation workshop is something that a project manager, innovation teams and dedicated facilitators often relish. Ideation sessions are often dynamic, and helping every team member generate ideas, conduct user research and unleash their creative juices can be gratifying for all involved.
Having a solid set of facilitation skills is a great start for anyone leading an ideation workshop though you may also want to employ a dedicated facilitator. A successful ideation workshop is a process that benefits from carefully shepherding a diverse group through divergence and convergence and a single ideation technique without expertise is unlikely to yield the results you want.
A knowledge of ideation techniques and prior experience of running or participating in an ideation workshop is also a massive benefit, though if you plan accordingly and follow the ideation session template above, do you should be fine. Ideation workshops such as the above can flow quite easily if your team is well prepared.
If you are looking for a professional facilitator for your ideation workshop, you may consider Board of Innovation as expert innovation facilitators.
A successful ideation workshop can create incredible innovation, so be sure to properly resource your team, whether that’s with internal or external resources.
Check out the ideation workshop template details including step-by-step plan with instructions, worksheets, timings, printable schedule and more
Support materials
- Brainstorming Cards
- Opposition Thinking Tool
- Trend Matrix
- Analogy Thinking Template
- +50 Business & Revenue Model Examples
- Idea Shopping Cart
- Concept Cards
What is ideation?
As per Board of Innovation:
Ideation is the process of forming ideas and concepts. In the corporate environment, “Ideation” defines the generation of new ideas and concepts to solve specific problems, either problems that your customers or clients are facing (thus creating business concepts for new products and services that your organization can provide them with), or problems that your organization is experiencing (thus resulting into improvements in the internal structure or processes).
In both these scenarios, you’ll need to gather the right set of minds from your organization and a good mix of facilitators to build awesome new ideas for your team to take action on.
This effective ideation workshop is a proven process to help a team create innovative ideas and solve business problems as a group.
About the company
Board of Innovation makes corporates innovate like startups through strategy consulting, HR talent schemes and organizational transformation programs.
We don’t just facilitate the process of innovation. Our team will bring own business ideas to the table. Our innovation tools help to copy business principles from one industry to the other. We like to get our hands dirty as co-entrepreneurs. Together we look for the most suited way to test your innovative business case in a real market context.
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