What is an Idea? How to Perfect the Ideation Process (2024)

Developing a great idea is central to the success of any e-commerce business, but the process can feel elusive. For example, how do you come up with new ideas, much less distinguish between good ideas and bad ones?

“Great teams discuss ideas without any regard for ego. In great teams, the success of the idea has nothing to do with their own success. All that matters is helping them find the best ideas.” Founder of Shopify Tobias Lütke, CEO and CEO To tell. This quote highlights how important it is for entrepreneurs to set up the right team and process for idea generation.

Certain ideation techniques can help improve problem-solving skills and creative thinking when generating ideas. Learn more about some of the most popular idea generation techniques and strategies to prepare your next idea. brainstorming session.

What is idea generation?

Ideation is the process of generating, selecting, and refining new ideas to solve problems or exploit opportunities. This process requires communication, creativity, and problem-solving skills to generate innovative solutions to specific objectives. For example, e-commerce sellers use the ideation process when creating new products. Production line or develop a new one content marketing strategy.

Idea generation stage

Idea generation is the third stage. design thinking process, a framework for developing creative ideas. To summarize all the stages of the process:

1. Please empathize. This phase includes a clear understanding of the customer’s experience and needs.

2. Define. At this stage, we set clear goals for innovation and development based on customer needs.

3. I’ll come up with an idea. The ideation phase involves gathering as many possible solutions to a problem or opportunity as possible through various ideation techniques.

Four. prototype. This stage involves creating virtual or physical versions of the solution for testing and improvement.

Five. Release, observe, and restart. In this final stage, you release a version of your idea to your customers, observe how it performs and how your customers react, and start new ideas and improvements based on the feedback.

How to prepare for an ideation session

1. Set clear goals
2. conduct market research
3. Organize a group of diverse participants
4. Please consider the environment
5. establish a process

The following steps will set you up for a productive ideation session.

1. Set clear goals

Create a clear problem statement to define the problem you want to solve or the opportunity you want to explore. For example, you may want to generate new ideas for cosmetics and decide how to launch your own products. subscription box serviceor establish a design challenge to improve the user experience on your e-commerce store.

Whatever your focus, define clear goals to keep your ideation session on track and keep everyone working toward the same goal.

2. Conducting market research

Before your ideation session, prepare market research materials about your industry, business, and business. Target audience.Use quantitative research for sales, marketing, etc. e-commerce analysis In addition to channels, we also conduct qualitative research such as customer feedback from surveys and interviews.

To stay focused, capture data that directly applies to the goals of your ideation session. One of the benefits of using an e-commerce platform like Shopify That means it comes with an integrated analysis report This allows you to choose which customer behavior trends to focus on.

3. Organize a diverse group of participants

Idea sessions are only as good as the creativity and productivity of the people who participate. Select a team of individuals with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and skill sets to contribute ideas. Teams that have too many members with similar perspectives run the risk of not being able to think outside the box. By bringing together people with different opinions, you can keep the ideation process fresh and challenge the assumptions of those who are too close to the topic.

Strike a balance between inviting enough participants to generate quality ideas, but avoiding too many cooks in the kitchen. For small businesses, usually a group of 2 to 8 people is enough for him.

For example, you can involve two team members from your customer service department and two software engineers to participate in an ideation session on how to improve your service. User experience (UX) design of your website.

4. Consider the environment

The space in which your ideation session takes place has a huge impact on its outcome. Whether you hold your ideation sessions virtually or in-person, consider how you can create a space that fosters creativity and productivity. For example, you can hold ideation sessions with your team in your new coworking space instead of your regular office.

Give your team access to tools like whiteboards, pen and paper, and reports with relevant information. If you’re hosting a virtual ideation session, set up a collaborative online system for remote note-taking and editing. Google Docs and Slack are both examples of online tools that can facilitate remote ideation sessions.

5. Establish a process

To facilitate a productive ideation session, communicate your goals, set ground rules for the process, and outline the ideation method you’ll use. Disorganized brainstorming sessions tend to be unfocused and unproductive. Develop a clear framework for generating ideas and filtering out only the good ones.

Decide who will be responsible for managing the session and keeping it running smoothly. Make sure everyone involved understands the purpose and process of the session and is prepared with plenty of advance notice. For example, you can establish a procedure for brainstorming new product ideas on a whiteboard before voting as a group on which ideas to pursue.

The best idea generation technique

Here are some specific ideation techniques to consider using with your team during your next ideation session.

brainstorming

One of the most popular ideation techniques is traditional ideation. brainstorming sessionThis involves a group of people generating as many ideas and solutions as possible for a particular topic. In a brainstorming session like this, don’t evaluate or judge ideas at first. The key is to create an open and creative space where innovative and unexpected ideas are welcomed.

There are several ways to organize a brainstorming session, including a round-robin structure. Just have each member of your team submit ideas one after the other until you have enough ideas to start working. Or you could do a brainwriting exercise where one of your girlfriends writes down an idea and passes it to another member to contribute or edit.

Reversal idea

One of the more unconventional ways of thinking is called reverse thinking or inversion. This technique involves exploring, defining, and imagining the opposite of the ideal outcome. You can learn more about the obvious pitfalls to avoid when looking for the right idea by using idea generation techniques that help you identify the worst possible ideas for a topic.

For example, when thinking about how to improve your customer service, you can consider the worst customer service interaction you can imagine and work backwards from there to come up with ideas to avoid big mistakes.

Scamper

Another of the most popular ideation techniques is called SCAMPER. This is an acronym that stands for substitution, combination, adaptation, modification, repurposing, deletion, and rearrangement. Each of these words represents a tip that you can use to think creatively and question your assumptions about a particular topic.

• Alternative: This asks what aspects of your problem or opportunity can be replaced by others. For example, you can replace it with a new one. product photo Great for older ones when considering how to increase traffic for your online store.

• combine: Ask yourself if you can combine different strategies, products, and ideas to create innovative solutions to your problems.

• To adapt: This includes considering whether existing solutions can be redefined or successful ideas from the past can be applied to new problems.

• Fix: You can focus on how to change and improve your existing products, services, or strategies.

• Repurpose it: When developing a new product line, consider alternative uses to identify opportunities you may not have considered previously.

• lose: What aspects of the topic can be reduced, simplified, or removed? Ask yourself what is the simplest solution to a particular problem, or what is the most important version of your product or service.

• Relocation: Consider how different orders and arrangements of a particular solution can yield different results. For example, try different placements of your solution. Checkout process.

creative pause

Generating ideas in focused brainstorming sessions can be productive, but it can also put undue pressure on team members and hinder creativity. One possible solution to this problem is creative pause. This includes intentionally interrupting your brainstorming session with activities like taking a walk outside or listening to music. Another creative pausing strategy is to stop your session for the day and resume it the next morning after getting some sleep.

Beyond its usefulness in recharging creative energy, creative pause methods can stimulate ideas that emerge organically outside of the traditional brainstorming framework. When you take a creative pause, keep a journal or tablet nearby and set a schedule to establish creative pauses as part of your daily routine.

mind map

A mind map is a visual technique for forming ideas and developing questions related to a particular topic. This technique places a single problem or opportunity in the center of the diagram and builds an expansive structure that naturally grows from that point, including additional elements and subcategories of the topic.

Mind mapping is a particularly useful method for simplifying complex problems by breaking them down into key parts. For example, an e-commerce seller can use mind mapping to understand the problematic elements of a particular supply chain that impact their business.