A lot of time, effort, and expense goes into developing new products, but where do new ideas come from?
When we begin a new project we organise short, focused idea generation sessions, which go something like;
- Assemble a team of creative people – they dont all need to be experts in the field.
- Brief the team on the new project, what are we trying to achieve? What design challenges need to be overcome? Where can we challenge pre-conceptions of what this product needs to be? Where can we innovate?
- Look at individual aspects in isolation, how can we solve this? How would the user benefit?
- Fill a wall with very quick sketched ideas on Post-it notes.
- Dont get bogged down in detail or reasons not to do something, be open to ideas at this point.
- Spend time in group discussion, and time individually exploring ideas without distraction.
- Start to assess the ideas available. Look at groups of solutions and consider how they could work together as a whole.
If you involve a range of people at the idea generation stage, the product opportunity is more widely explored, and the design team has confidence that they have a comprehensive range of solutions to work with during the development process.
This is undertaken as a standard part of the concept generation activity at 4D Products, and we believe our clients really benefit from a broad perspective and good range of solutions to any given challenge
