What is ideation?

Ideation, in our understanding, is the process of generating and communicating a new idea to others, in the context of a business model. It is a systematic thinking process on how a new idea may turn out from its initial concept to its ultimate implementation.
The notion of how ideation arises itself could come from past or present facts or information, external influence, speculation, say or belief, attitude or principle. It may be presented as illustration or drawing, a written draft or even verbal expression.

How ideation works

To put it simply, ideation is the process of coming up with ideas, then spinning those ideas into executable action within the real world. And for a company or an organisation, anyone who is tangentially or directly related to the operation – from lowest-level workers to managers to customers to partners and stakeholders – can both provide ideas, and themselves perform the act of generating ideas. They can do this through brainstorming sessions, open forums, seminars, team-building exercises, surveys, social media, and so on.

Characteristics required for successful idea generation

Ideation, in this sense, requires consciously adopting aspects to your character that you might be predisposed to have, or might need to cultivation and learn.

• Adapt: Be able to change the way you perceive, interpret and develop new scaffolds of thought as incoming input is created.
• To combine is to ‘build a novel generative system that captures relationships among initially irrelevant concepts, attributes, or topics’.
• Disruptive: causing one to revisit conventional thinking or models by challenging conventional beliefs or norms.
• Reversal: Counter present endings, or impasses, by turning them around or quickly swerving in a more profitable direction.
• Dreaming and Imagining: seeing in our head a new picture of the possible (using metaphors, images or stories to externally embody abstract needs so that there is space to envision ‘bridges’ to the possible).
• Experiment: Be open and be curious enough, be willing and ready to explore, to venture, be willing and ready to test, to try, to try and test.
• Pattern-finding: Strive to see common threads of meaning and ways of seeing, acting and being; to recognise attributes or shared values ​​that cut across the landscape of contributions; and, finally, to use common harmonic threads to devise solutions.
• Curiosity: Be prepared to ask questions that are uncomfortable, stupid or even crazy. Be willing to go where you need to go or do what you have to do, to learn and see something new and different.

Simply giving everyone space to put forward ideas – without fear of negative responses, and without an unbalanced distribution of intellectual authority among competing members – can be one of the biggest stumbling blocks to creating a culture that is open to new insights. Elevated pressure on the team, by those higher up, for the team to come up with solutions to challenges also won’t somehow allow the right types of insights to see the light of day.

Moreover, as a leader, do you want the team to wait until there is a ‘share ideas’ session on the calendar? Of course not. The solution is to promote a welcoming professional environment where sharing new ideas, being open to feedback, listening and supporting are constant within your team.

What is an ideation session?

An ideation session is a gathering of people working together to come up with and discuss ideas creatively. Often there is a leader or facilitator, typically with a specific issue or idea being discussed or studied.

Participants should include team members, stakeholders, subject matter experts, community stakeholders or end-users.

Specifically, experts do this by engaging in specific idea-generation activities, such as brainstorming, mind mapping, role-playing, or visualising ideas on a whiteboard during an ideation session.

The session encourages freewheeling discussion with participants sharing their ideas, insights, reflections, associations. Ideas can build from one another; participants can follow their ideas and intuitions in what can be a dynamic and immersive process.

An ideation session should deliver more ideas, many more, and it should reveal things no one thought of before. Its goal is to explore what might be, and to challenge our assumptions along the way. It should help us think differently.

An ideation session encourages individual or group creativity, lateral thinking and the identification of unusual responses or methods. This process leads on to the identification of a tangible outcome: an innovative idea – one that can then be developed or refined for a particular purpose, to help solve an identified problem, make or improve upon a process, or even to find a new way of doing something.