An Ideation Session and Design Thinking

A day-long immersion in small group innovation thinking

A few weeks ago I was invited to participate in an ideation session by a Park City-based strategy and innovation-consulting group. The purpose of the all day session was to develop innovative ideas for a major manufacturer of ready-to-eat breakfast cereals. Together with nine other individuals, some in marketing-related businesses, some not, we gathered in small groups of three or four and brainstormed ideas about improving the product or packaging, promotional and merchandising ideas and new product possibilities.

The ideation sessions were led by one of the partners who used different activities to stimulate thinking. (If Apple Computer were to develop a breakfast cereal, what would it be like? If Beyonce were to endorse a breakfast cereal, what kind of cereal might it be?) We would slide quickly from topic to topic, recording our thoughts in rapid-fire succession on sheets of paper and note cards. At times it seemed rather chaotic, but it was broken up with plenty of food (expected), as well as interactive games. At one point we broke up into teams and shot at each other kid-style with dart guns (unexpected).

At the end of the day we had amassed some 500 random ideas for the client. Some ideas were clearly out there. (What if there was a breakfast cereal concierge in the grocery store aisle who loaded up my cart with everything I wanted?) But some ideas were clearly something new and significant—and something that no one of us would have ever likely thought of on our own.

The concept of an ideation session in behalf of a client is an element of “design thinking”, the emerging acknowledgement in the business world that using the standard processes of the designer to solve business problems is an important tool in innovation.

I’m currently reading the book by IDEO president, Tim Brown, Change by Design. The book promotes the idea that innovation is a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps, of which ideation is the middle space. Much as the ideation session I experienced, innovation is an iterative, non-linear journey—fundamentally an exploratory process. In the words of Tim Brown, “Design thinking will feel chaotic to those experiencing it for the first time. But over the life of a project, it invariably comes to make sense and achieves results that differ markedly from the linear, milestone-based processes that define traditional business practices.”