Six Keys To Productive innovation Ideation Creative Workshops

If your innovation workshops produce lacklustre results, what’s missing?

Six Key Elements of a Power Workshop

Whether it’s a single workshop of your whole innovation process, nothing extraordinary is going to happen if you don’t have the right team, right attitude, right energy and right moderation.

It’s not luck, or a single sexy new technique that’ll make the difference.

To guarantee a successful outcome every-time, you’ll need six crucial ingredients …

Challenge

How you define your workshop ‘challenge’ or ‘brainstorming-question’ is key to success.

A ‘closed’ challenge will limit team engagement and shut down their creativity.    A well defined, ‘open’ challenge will inspire imagination and empower the lateral leaps that inspire breakthrough solutions.

Empathy

The best solutions are generated by brains who have genuine empathy with the problem.

That’s why so many breakthrough solutions are generated by people who are solving problems they’ve experienced themselves.   The key is to make problems ‘real’ and give brainstormers ‘first-hand experience’.

Inspiration

Without fresh, provocative stimulus it’s hard to visualise a different paradigm.

That’s why the much maligned concept of ‘thinking outside the box’ is actually so relevant.  Current understanding forms the walls of the box.  Only fresh, inspiring stimulus will ever force us to re-evaluate the challenge and re-imagine the solution.

Diverse teams produce richer, more imaginative solutions.

Whether it’s cultural diversity, psychological diversity, economic diversity, gender diversity, or just multi-disciplinary teams – it’s noticeable that the most diverse teams produce the most novel solutions.  The key is to get them sharing perspectives, sparking fresh thinking and collaboratively building solutions.

Energy

A well chosen space and carefully planned brainstorming exercises will unleash the team’s creative energy.

The human brain needs light, space and fresh air to function.  Your room choice can empower or inhibit this.

Once the environment is right, well chosen thinking-tools and energisers will fire-up the team’s mental processes and generate the lateral, creative leaps great brainstorming needs.

Safety

A willingness to be playful and take risks is critical to the creation of disruptive solutions.

In many ways THE most critical task of any workshop moderator is to create an environment where the brainstorming team feel safe enough to embrace the unthinkable, secure in the knowledge that any idea, however hare-brained, could be the breakthrough solution everyone is looking for!

So, How’s Brand Development’s Approach Different?

No two innovation challenges are the same, so it would be foolish to think the same process would every time.

HOWEVER the same six crucial ingredients will always make the difference between success and failure.

We build our innovation processes and creative workshops from scratch – so they always match your challenges, get the best out of your team … and deliver the results you need!

Need to Solve Complex Strategic Problems?

Small-Team Strategic Incubator

Small team, moderated workshops can be the perfect format for strategic problem solving, concept crafting or even building action-based brand implementation plans.

Find out how we helped the team at Nespresso plan an inspired digital strategy here

Need To Stretch Thinking And Generate Disruptive Ideas Fast?

Creative Hot-House

Multi-disciplinary creative hot-houses are a brilliant way of harnessing the brainpower of your team and expert witnesses to generate disruptive and creative new solutions.

Find out how we helped the team at RB generate actionable NPD ideas here

Need To Create & Evolve Winning Concepts?

Rapid Consumer Recycler

Rapid-recyclers combine hot-house creativity with consumer-modules to generate, evaluate and evolve concepts in real-time – the ultimate fast-track solution

Find out how we used helped the Tommee Tippee brand team generate and winning concepts here