A collection of systematic innovation tools and techniques to help your students generate the best concepts for development.

What are the biggest pains that cause problems, unmet needs, or wants? How do you find out if your proposal is more likely to fly, or to crash and burn? Want to "go wide" with your concepts and outcomes, but still keep your ideas viable and well-organized?

The Ideation Toolkit contains links to cards and other resources exploring painstorming, biomimicry, bisociation, screening, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), the multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT), and more. Use this variety of systematic innovation tools and techniques to help your students more routinely recognize opportunities, generate a wide array of possible concepts, and select the most promising concept for further development!

• Strategy & Problem Definition 
  • Painstorming helps identify problems worth solving. Students learn to observe the pains—frustrations and faults, anomalies and concerns—in products and processes, as well as extrapolate less-obvious challenges to encompass diverse needs. They’ll uncover and pursue the best opportunities for improvement while considering factors such as budget and timeline. 
  • Blue Ocean Strategy (from the book by Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne) is about creating and capturing uncontested market space, thereby making the competition irrelevant. It is based on the view that market boundaries and industry structure are not a given and can be reconstructed by the actions and beliefs of industry players.

• Ideation & Concept Generation
  • The Concept Fan technique, created by Edward de Bono, instructs students to approach ideation from a broad view of concepts and approaches that meet the directive, while generating alternatives to grow the list of ideas. 
  • Biomimicry leads students to study the natural world to spark ideas for more efficient and sustainable products and services. Identify and uncover opportunities ripe for innovative solutions! 
  • Bisociation moves us beyond mere association. Students will learn to make connections between an ideation topic and a random stimulus to blend these seemingly unrelated concepts into new patterns and products.

• Idea Management & Implementation 
  • Screening (Will It Fly?) is an approach derived from research on successful venture capital investors and useful to entrepreneurs. It's intended to measure the worthiness of a business proposal and identify strengths and weaknesses BEFORE extensive resources are expended.
  • Six Thinking Hats was created by Edward de Bono to help people change the way they think about problems, examining them from different viewpoints. Leverage the Six Thinking Hats to help you explore your ideas from all angles - one angle (hat) at a time. 
  • Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is a decision matrix where you define criteria, prioritize criteria, assign weights to the criteria, perform a pairwise comparison, organize data into a chart, rate each design against the criteria, and calculate scores for each design option.
  • Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT) is a straightforward method for making decisions when the design alternatives have multiple criteria that describe different aspects of their value for others.

Each card or resource contains supplemental tips to introduce and facilitate these concepts.