Bringing Play to Work

I recently went along to a primary school  open day to see about enrolling my four year old in her first year at school. There’s quite a bit to take in. But one thing caught my attention. This particular school made a big deal about using play based learning in the prep year. It got me thinking about how we might bring play based learning into the business environment, and to creative thinking in particular. Today’s challenge is how to make brainstorming your business model fun…

Provoking your Business Model

This post continues my exploration of lateral thinking techniques and their application to the business model generation space. You can see my original post on how lateral thinking applies to business problems here, and a previous post on using random word entry to stimulate business mode innovation here.

Linking your Business Model to Strategy

This article follows on from yesterday’s post on using future scenarios to put your business model through its paces. Drawing on some of the great ideas put forwards in Business Model Generation, I thought I’d pull together my own view on using a number of strategy lenses to look a bit more closely at your business model.

Brainstorm your Business Model

The fundamental goal of a business start-up is to find a business model that scales. This can take a while, and is likely to require a number of iterations of the business model before the right one is found. A creative problem solving approach might start out by understanding the problems that need to be solved, looking at what has been done before, and then generating a lot of different business models before starting to test which ones work the best.

In today’s post, I’ll look at three different brainstorming techniques which can be used to develop business models using groups and the business model canvas.

Brainstorming with Subject Matter Experts

I wrote about brainstorming a while back, as you can see here. And then I ran across this movie:

Many of the core concepts of effective brainstorming are covered really well here including writing everything down, saying whatever comes to mind, and holding off judgement. But it made we wonder about the times when nobody seems to have the faintest idea what they are talking about. Sound familiar? The sessions where lots of ideas are generated but none of them seem to be remotely implementable. You might even question whether the session delivered any ideas with value whatsoever.

There are plenty of ways to try and remedy this problem, the main ones seem to be:

• invite some people who know their stuff
• do some research before you start generating ideas

In this great post, we see how much effort IDEO put into exploration before they even consider brainstorming and ideating. It’s a pretty simple lesson, but one worth remembering. It’s not the tools that get the job done, it’s the people using the tools.

Collaborative Structures for Open Innovation, part 4

In this final post on the topic of Open Innovation I will continue to use the Productive Thinking Model to explore the question:

What kind of collaborative structures can business use to source and exploit new ideas?

What is Collaboration?

We’ve had a look at some existing approaches to collaboration, as well as some of the features of a successful collaboration. Having had some time to think on it, I’ve come up with the following simple model for the collaborative process up until the point at which an ideas is selected for implementation:

As shown, collaborations need an agreed purpose around which groups can form. Once groups are formed, they will then search for solutions and some form of selection will be made before being acted upon in some way.

Brainstorming that Works

This is the final part in my 6 part series on Brainstorming techniques

Many countries have their own version of a joke in which two locals are asked for directions. After arguing about the best way to go, they finally decide “you just can’t get there from here”. And so it is with brainstorming. The basic principal starts out with the search for those elusive creative ideas. The ones that make you think “of course, now why didn’t I think of that”. Since we ARE unable to get there from here, we seek a little help. In this case, that help comes in the form of a brainstorm.

Idea Selection

This is part 5 in my series on brainstorming techniques

We’ve covered a lot of ground in helping your groups create a lot of ideas. But what do you do with them all? And how do you make sure that the ones you leave behind really are dud ideas? There seem to be two main camps here

• choose your favourite, based on gut feel
• evaluate all ideas according to some fairly simple criteria

Brainstorming the Question

This is part 4 in my series on brainstorming techniques.

So far we have covered good old fashioned brainstorming, in which everyone takes turns and we hope for the best in terms of group dynamics and the volume of ideas generated. Then we moved on to look at brainwriting and other techniques in which individuals write out their ideas before sharing with the group. Yesterday we looked at some really cool ways to manage multi-group dynamics and idea sharing as the brainstorm divides into smaller groups and moves about getting creative. But what about idea quality? How do we really know that the end result will have generated ideas of any interest whatsoever? And have we asked the right questions in the first place?

The following techniques turn away from brainstorming the answers, and focus instead on brainstorming the questions.

Idea Sharing

This is part 3 in my series on brainstorming techniques.

In brainwriting, participants are focused on a single problem. Individuals write out their ideas, pass them around, and build on the ideas of others. But what if you want your room to be a bit more dynamic? What if you could pass your participants around instead of their lists of ideas? What if you could choreograph these movements in a way that supercharged your brainstorms, engaged your participants and increased your idea output? Maybe all that is needed is a bit more theatre to get our creative juices going…

These idea sharing techniques are all based on the concept of moving people around. I’ve had a lot of success with these approaches to brainstorms, and generally find them great at maintainging energy and focus as well as generating some really interesting ideas.