Impulse für Innovation

Brainstorming is probably the most widely used method for generating ideas in the world today. However, almost always, it is either very inefficient or doesn’t yield any useful results at all. The success rate (the proportion of ideas produced that are classified as “good”) of brainstorming sessions is variously quoted as being between 0.1% and 1%. In one article which appeared in the German magazine Brand Eins, an ideation workshop yielded only one or two good ideas out of a total of 1500! Not surprisingly, Brainstorming has developed a bad reputation, and the announcement of a corporate “creative workshop” is often met with scepticism and resistance.

This is an exercise I do with students in my university course “Idea Engineering”. Its goal is to demonstrate how a well-chosen change of perspective can make generating new ideas very easy indeed.

Suppose we have been given the task of coming up with an idea for a simple computer game. By “simple”, I mean the kind that is created for a mobile device or for Facebook.

The script for the idea generation consists of three steps:

1. Think of an interesting adjective.
2. Who or what has this property?
3. What does he/she/it want to achieve?

Your answers to questions 2. and 3. are your idea for a computer game!

Here are three examples:

1. Devastating,
   Squelchy,
   Divine.
2. A volcano,
   A swamp,
   An angel.
3. Bury cities ith its lava,
   Trap unwary travellers,
   Protect an innocent mortal from harm.