How to Generate New Ideas

Mind mapping is more than just a visual outlining method. It’s a structured approach to organizing complex information and concepts. 

Imagine you’re launching a new product. To create a mind map, you’d write the product's name in the center of your outline. From there, you’d draw branches representing major categories, such as marketing, product design, and distribution. Next, you’d add sub-branches that detail specific actions or elements. 

This visual representation focuses on organizing every project detail, highlighting interdependencies, and ensuring teams see the big picture so they can collaborate effectively. It’s a useful way to plan complex projects while keeping sight of overarching objectives. 

Blue sky thinking, or brainstorming, encourages unrestrained creativity. When developing a new project, team members throw out specific details or constraints and voice any and every idea, no matter how unconventional. 

While the approach might sound chaotic, focusing on quantity rather than the quality lets groundbreaking concepts emerge. Once brainstorming concludes, you scrap unrealistic suggestions and turn viable ones into actionable strategies aligned with your product vision board.

Like brainstorming, brain writing focuses on amassing different perspectives. But rather than shouting out ideas, team members jot everything down on paper. They then pass their papers around in a circle, and receiving teammates build on each other’s ideas by adding new perspectives or pointing out pain points. The cycle continues until everyone has their original paper back — now fleshed out with team reactions and elaborations.

This technique diversifies ideas and stimulates inclusivity, which is useful for large groups where some team members might be more comfortable verbally sharing ideas than others. 

SCAMPER stands for substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to another use, eliminate, and reverse. It’s a technique to reimagine existing ideas, services, and products. For teams aiming to refresh their offerings, SCAMPER is a structured way to dream up enhancements and new directions. 

Imagine a product development team brainstorming ways to revitalize an old product to meet current consumer trends. Using the SCAMPER method, they explore multiple options for reinvention. The “substitute” prompt might lead to swapping a material for another with a lower cost, while “adapt” might stimulate ideas for tweaking the product to cater to a new audience. 

Sometimes, it’s helpful to step out of your role as a designer, developer, or project manager and think from your consumer's perspective. Role-playing requires you to simulate the users you aim to serve. 

Think about building a mobile app. Instead of relying on market data alone, role-playing would have you consider the app from the perspective of your target audience. You might think of how busy parents and teenagers uniquely navigate the app, providing real-time feedback to generate potential refinements and spotlight user concerns. 

If your team struggles to reverse roles, build AI-script based on customer metrics to create an accurate back-and-forth.

Like frames in a comic strip, story boarding sequences your idea's journey from concept to final product. Using images, quotes, and other graphics brings procedural or product management to life. Story boarding transforms abstract ideas into clear visual narratives, pointing out potential areas for enhancement and friction points in a way that suits visual learners. 

Teams sometimes get stuck on existing thought patterns, struggling to look beyond solutions they’ve already discussed or executed. Synectics utilizes unrelated problem analogies to stimulate creativity and generate new ideas.

Consider a development team that misunderstands customer needs and wastes time and resources designing unnecessary functions. The team could liken their situation to buying expensive toys for a dog who doesn’t like to play with them. The team would then brainstorm ideas to fix the issue in the analogy — like letting the dog choose a toy at the pet store. This idea can inspire the team to approach their problem in a similar way — by letting the consumer dictate their own preferences rather than prescribing them. 

To put this idea into action, the team could generate customer surveys or lead focus groups to gather user insights and then refine their development approach accordingly.