Idea Generation For Market Researchers (Part 3)

Over the previous two Monthly Dose of Design articles, we’ve introduced the topic of Design Thinking (DT), why it’s important for market researchers, and discussed the DT process’s ‘Define’ phase. This month in our four-part Design Thinking series. we’re discussing the DT process’s ‘Develop’ phase and sharing three key idea generation techniques you can use.

A quick recap

Before you generate ideas, you should’ve synthesized your insights into a ‘How Might We’ statement. This statement aligns your team, and your stakeholders, on the challenge you’re trying to solve. Once you have alignment on your ‘How Might We’ statement, you can progress to the ‘Develop’ phase.

 

 

What is the Develop Phase?

The ‘Develop’ phase is where (ideally diverse) teams start thinking of creative solutions to the problem they’re trying to solve. A diverse team means more perspectives are provided. This creates greater collective intelligence and promotes functional debate and disagreement. The ‘Develop’ phase aims to generate as many ideas as possible, regardless of feasibility. This ensures a wide range of potential design routes, some of which will eventually be prototyped.

Why is it important for market researchers?

This is usually where market researchers hand over to designers and exit the DT process. However, it’s crucial for market researchers to help create ideas. Market researchers have conducted research on the user/product/service and understand the problem that needs solving.

Six considerations for producing ideas

1. Keep to the ‘How Might We’ statement and stay focused on the topic
   Staying focused is crucial – if you stray from the How Might We statement and deviate from the aligned vision, you won’t solve the right problem.
2. Defer judgment or criticism and encourage weird, wacky, and wild ideas
   Ideation sessions should be a safe space where people can freely share their ideas and not be judged.
3. Aim for quantity and ruthlessness
   The most successful innovation systems create ideas en masse and kill losing ideas quickly. As we’re going wide and broad, we want to explore all possible solutions. By generating as many ideas as possible, we can ensure that we have a wide range of ideas to test.
4. Build on each other’s ideas
   Approach each other as friends, not foes. Cooperation and building on each other’s ideas are key in expanding ideas and helps create variations of an idea.
5. Be visual
   Be as visual as possible. You don’t have to be an artist to visualize your ideas, rough sketches are sufficient. Being visual helps open new possibilities and creates an interpretation of the idea which can easily be built on.
6. Lots of ideas are great, but you can’t develop all of them
   From the ideation sessions, you’ll generate lots of ideas. However, you can’t develop them all and will only take one or two forwards. We’ll discuss how you choose which ideas to take forward later on.

Three idea generation techniques

Many different idea generation techniques exist, but, we’re only going to discuss three:

1. Crazy Eights – generating lots of ideas

Crazy Eights is a fast-paced activity that stimulates creativity by asking individual team members to sketch at least eight potential solutions to the How Might We statement in eight minutes.

 

Team members then present their ideas to the rest of the group and discuss them.

 

Feedback is then provided on the potential solutions so they can be developed further.

2. Collaborative drawing – learning from one another

Team members have five minutes to draw their ideas and line them up alongside the ideas of other members on a canvas. Ideas are then compared, and team members find ways different ideas can co-exist.

3. Mission Impossible – working with seemingly impossible limitations

Mission Impossible centers around exaggerating existing constraints to where they are seemingly impossible to solve. This encourages people to think laterally and outside of the box to discover new and exciting solutions.

Examples of limitations: ‘How do we build a house in one day?’ and ‘How do we build a house using 100% recyclable materials’.

If you’re running multiple ideation sessions, or have lots of people in your session, you can split your session into smaller groups and provide each group with a different limitation. Like all the techniques discussed, this is a fast technique and should have a time limit of 5-10 mins.

Voting

From the many ideas you generate, you’ll need to pick a couple to develop further as it’s impractical to develop them all. Voting helps with this.

Voting creates a prioritized hierarchy of the ideas and the one with the most votes is taken to the Deliver phase where it’ll be turned into a prototype. It’s important that people vote independently as if people vote publicly, they can fall foul of HiPPO (where team members follow the highest-paid person’s opinion) or groupthink, where they simply follow the crowd. There are lots of ways to vote: via post-it notes, or digitally where one person collects all of the votes and announces the winners.

Next month…

Next month we’ll dive into DT’s Deliver phase and discuss the most effective ways to prototype your solutions and test them.

Header Image: Martin Wilner, Unsplash