Teamwork Starts With Dream Work: How to Start the Ideation Process
84% of CEOs believe innovation is critical to the growth of their companies.
Without innovation, your brand can become stagnant and outpaced by competitors. If you don’t want to watch your hard work get old and stale, try implementing an ideation process to get your team members to come up with innovative ideas regularly.
Keep reading to find out how you can spark creativity by creating a team culture of innovation.
How Does Ideation Help?
Ideation is one way to get yourself and your team to ask the right questions about innovation. It pushes focus to your users and their needs. Then you can create insights about them that solve their problems.
Ideation brings together all team members and gives them a place to use their strengths to offer uniquely helpful perspectives. It is also a great way to get the obvious and overused solutions in your head out of the way and drive your team towards more optimal solutions.
Get Started With Ideation
To start the ideation process you will need a high level of team collaboration. Design thinking is a complex and intricate task that requires a range of soft skills.
The best way to get comfortable with using ideation to find creative solutions is to start applying what the experts recommend. Your team will learn with experience.
Then, adapt your strategy as you find out what is working for your team and what is not.
Prepare for the Process
Start with a process like brainstorming. Many people are familiar with this activity and they can practice coming up with new ideas in a safe space. Follow these tips to help your team have the best possible brainstorming session.
Ideation is not a linear process, but there still needs to be some form of organization and structure. It will guide sessions and keep team members from disagreements that stop the flow of creativity.
Here are a few ways you can set your team up for success:
Match Ideas to Strategic Goals
Set quantifiable goals that are easy to reach but ambitious enough to need a plan of attack. Define factors like if the goal is long-term or a one-time task. Define who will be in charge of tackling this goal.
Hammering out the details like this can offer some more clarity around the problem you are trying to solve and the opportunities there may be.
Always Have Structure
If you don’t have a systematic approach to your ideation process, you risk making superficial results.
If you create systems to follow ideation can become part of your daily team innovation routine. Building an innovation culture is what you should be striving for.
You will find the best results when you can embed a mindset of innovation in your team and their daily activities are done from this perspective. This way everyone is creating value for the team on a regular basis.
Create the Perfect Ideation Process
The ideation process is a great way to get your team together, think out of the box, and create value on a regular basis.
It can set your brand up for success as it will separate you from the competition with truly innovative ideas for your customer’s pain points.
Do you want to hear more about helpful ways to maximize your team’s efficiency? Then read some more of our blog posts that cover all kinds of useful tips to improve your business.
