Creativity Techniques

What is it?

When do I need it?

How does it work?

Thinking Caps

Thinking caps let you examine a problem from different perspectives. Each Team Member takes on a role, represented by a different coloured hat (or another symbol), and argues from that role — enriching the discussion with different points of view.

Use thinking caps when you want Team Members to step outside their typical roles — it opens up the exchange of views. Make sure nobody takes their role to extremes. A moderator helps.

1. Choose a problem and suitable roles (= thinking caps) for your team. Allocate colours and meanings (e.g. white: analytical, red: emotional, black: critical, yellow: optimistic, green: creative, blue: structured).

2. Prepare a prop for each role in the matching colour (e.g. hats, armbands or place cards) and explain the roles to your team.

3. Discuss the issue and document the results.

Recombination

90% of all innovations recombine existing concepts. Combine different ideas — the more varied, the better — in new ways to create something new. Replace elements of your idea with ones from outside your comfort zone, add new elements, or drop elements everyone assumes are essential.

If your team lacks diversity, the ideas you generate will all look similar. Recombining ideas from outside your comfort zone widens that spectrum and pushes you to think differently.

1. Research creative ideas from outside your team members' comfort zone.

2. Prepare the ideas so they are easy to understand and easy to combine in the workshop.

3. Have your team members pick two to three ideas at random and use them to generate a new idea or development.

Constructiveness

New ideas start out unfinished — critical Team Members often reject them too soon. Turn negative criticism into concrete suggestions for improvement, and a shaky proposition can grow, step by step, into a great idea.

Team Members who are used to critical thinking ("I think it's a good idea, but...") often struggle to give feedback that actually improves an idea. Don't suppress the criticism — use it as the basis for a constructive suggestion.

1. Every Team Member presents one or several ideas.

2. The other Team Members write down their criticisms and then translate these into suggestions for improvement.

3. Discuss the suggestions as a team and use them to develop the ideas further.

Your first ideas are usually built on habitual thinking. To break out of that comfort zone, discard the first (often obvious) ideas and create new ones. This pushes Team Members to use their full creative potential.

Use this technique to make room for more creative ideas by deliberately setting the obvious ones aside. It works well when your team produces plenty of ideas but few genuinely new ones.

1. Have every Team Member quickly write down three to five ideas and present them. Then reflect together on what the group needs to "unlearn" to develop new ideas.

2. Set these initial ideas aside, and give everyone enough time to come up with another six to ten ideas.

3. Compare the creativity of the different ideas.

Extreme Goals

When people optimise an existing Business Model, they usually come up with ideas that only tweak or extend it. Set an extreme goal instead — doubling your turnover overnight, or turning a product business into a service business — and it forces you to think differently.

Give your team an extreme goal when you want to free them from habitual thinking and ways of working. Be ready to question your current Business Model — and revolutionise it if necessary.

1. Think of an extreme goal (including a time frame) as a starting point for developing ideas.

2. As a team, come up with ideas about how you could achieve this goal.

3. Reflect together on which ideas have potential for further development, and fold them into your existing Business Model.

Trigger Questions

Keep improving your initial ideas instead of sticking to them rigidly. Trigger questions help you evaluate an idea critically, then use that evaluation to sharpen and flesh it out.

Once you've developed and prioritised some initial ideas, use trigger questions to refine your favourites. They help whenever an idea still feels broad, abstract, or vague.

1. Get your Team Members to present your favourite idea.

2. Discuss the following questions as a team: What can we play up or leave out to communicate our value added more effectively? What comparison can we use to represent our value added? Who or what could replace our product or service? How can we communicate our value added without words and without showing the product?

3. Have the team present the refined ideas after the discussion.

Patterns

Innovative Business Models often follow recognisable patterns — shop-in-shop, franchise, pay-per-use, freemium, lock-in, and more. Apply these patterns to your business and you'll generate exciting ideas for Business Model innovation.

Ideation often focuses on innovative products and services alone. Use existing patterns as inspiration when you want your team to think about innovative Business Models too.

1. Prepare some suitable Business Model patterns and present them to your team using examples (see "Business Model Inspirator").

2. For each pattern, work as a team to develop a Business Model scenario for your company using your existing or new products/services.

3. Evaluate the scenarios and apply them to your Business Model.

Moodboards

Moodboards are physical or digital collections of visual content that make a solution space stylistically tangible and easy to communicate. They clarify hard-to-explain content through projection and example.

Moodboards are especially useful during ideation to communicate your thoughts visually. They build a perceptual world around your idea and give shape to rough, quick concepts.

1. Think deeply about the question you are working on and let an image develop in your mind.

2. Collect visual content (digital or physical) that makes these mental images tangible for others — the level of abstraction is up to you.

3. Cluster and arrange the content on a blank page so the overall picture creates a tangible style world and communicates the different solution ideas in detail.