'I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else," the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso once said. He is right. As you go through an effective creative process method stage by stage, the nature of an idea changes and evolves.
Let me explain how this evolution takes place through a process such as my X-IDEA method with its five stages: Xploration, Ideation, Development, Evaluation and Action.
1. Capture any initial idea while making sense of your project case: "Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them," said the British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. What happens when you think of an idea and fail to write it down? Exactly. You forget it very quickly.
When you first start to investigate your innovation case with your team, inevitably you will already have an idea about how to resolve your challenge. Write down and collect these "initial ideas" so that you can return to them later.
2. Generate hundreds of raw ideas during Ideation: "To have a great idea, have a lot of them," the American inventor Thomas Edison recommended. The ideation stage is about idea quantity.
These ideas don't need to be perfect yet, which is why we call them "raw ideas". However, they should all meet the essential criteria of an idea -- a suggestion of a possible course of action expressed as a sentence with a verb constituting the action element.
Usually, a viable raw idea has anything between 10 and 20 words, just enough to fit nicely on a 3x3 inch Post-it note. As the American poet Mark van Doren noted: "Bring ideas in and entertain them royally, for one of them may be the king."
3. Design raw ideas into idea concepts: "Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen, and thinking what nobody has thought." In the spirit of this statement by the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Albert von Szent-Gyorgi, your team should review all raw ideas generated during ideation (and also any initial ideas jotted down in the first process stage) to discover the most intriguing, even wild ones and discard the majority of ordinary raw ideas.
In numerical terms, a team that has produced a thousand raw ideas typically discovers around 200 intriguing ones.
"An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought," Picasso noted. As such, teams subsequently use their wild and interesting ideas to design idea concepts with the help of three transformative creative principles: elaboration, combination and transmutation.
A well-designed idea concept has anything between 100 and 250 words and meets five criteria: It needs to:
- detail what the idea is all about;
- whom it targets as a user or beneficiary;
- why it's valuable and meaningful to that target persona;
- have a simple idea sketch to express the concept visually;
- sum up its essence in a snappy title (typically up to five words).
Your team should aim for a portfolio of at least two dozen idea concepts.
4. Select your top ideas with the highest value potential: "When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong," said the American inventor Buckminster Fuller.
In a subsequent critical process stage (often called evaluation), all designed idea concepts get evaluated to understand their pros, cons and interesting aspects. Then, you pre-select which ones you move forward in the process and which ones you kill.
All concepts that survive this pre-screening get enhanced, and some might get prototyped. At the end of this stage, your team should settle on a handful of selected top ideas that you feel are beautiful and meaningful.
5. Finally, transform a top concept into a tangible innovation: "Ideas not coupled with action never become bigger than the brain cells they occupied," noted the American businessman and author Arnold Glasow. At the beginning of this final stage, the team needs to pitch each of their selected top ideas. Depending on how convincingly they pitch the value potential of each one, it is either killed or earmarked for implementation.
Finally, an idea activation team is formed to work on transforming the funded top idea into a tangible innovation deliverable -- a new product to be shipped, a new service to be launched, a new customer experience to be staged, or a new process to be implemented, among others.
"An idea can no more flow backward than can a river," noted the French writer Victor Hugo correctly. And just like it cannot be unthought, an idea flows forward through the creative process flow. So, take some time to let your ideas flow and grow in harmony with the flow of an effective innovation method until they transform into a beautiful innovation.
Dr Detlef Reis is the founding director and chief ideator of Thinkergy Limited (www.Thinkergy.com), the Creative Transformation Company in Asia. He is also an adjunct associate professor at the Hong Kong Baptist University, and an innovation adviser at the Institute for Knowledge & Innovation - South-East Asia, Bangkok University. He can be reached at dr.d@thinkergy.com
