I’m intrigued by a Stanford d.school professor and innovation thinker I just discovered. Some of you may already know of Jeremy Utley. For those who aren’t familiar, one way to start is by following him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/jeremyutley.
The One Simple Idea that I took away from my introduction to Jeremy is that the volume of ideas you create is the important metric for innovation success. Many great inventions are the result of 2,000 or more ideas being conceived, tried or tossed, combined, or applied. Ideation that focuses on volume of ideas rather than trying to identify the one best or right idea is the most powerful ideation.
Two corollaries.
There is no penalty for having a bad or useful or frivolous idea. You simply don’t apply it. To the contrary, it opens your mind to creativity. This is why, during my innovation consulting days, we would give ideation session participants silly little prizes for the most outlandish ideas.
We can train ourselves to generate multiple ideas. Like exercising your muscles, it is just practice. Take time daily to pick a topic, problem, or issue and generate a bunch of ideas of how to address it. Every day. It takes only moments, and you will start to develop your ideation ability. Think of your entire team doing this daily - and the multitude of great ideas that will stack up over time!
Last, Jeremy and Perry Klebahn write about this topic in Ideaflow. My copy just appeared on my doorstep, so I’ll write more about it later. Go grab your copy!
Enjoy!