There’s a process for good ideas!
Bright ideas are a big deal for business growth. If you want to grow, create new value, differentiate, or get traction in new markets you need customer-centered ideas that can be monetized.
But how do you get valuable ideas? The answer is structure. Yes, it might seem counterintuitive, but using a structured process will produce better ideas. In fact, a structured creative process is what you need.
Align’s Spark Session is a great example of how to structure a creative idea program. The format is drawn from Align’s proven process for product and service innovation - the 4 I’s of Strategic Innovation.
Specifically, a Spark Session facilitates the activities needed for coming up with customer-centered ideas. Any audience can be thought of as a customer… they don’t need to be paying customers. In fact, the process was recently used to identify recruiting solutions for entry-level employees.
Here’s how to get good ideas that create value.
Identify a specific target audience.
Reflect on their pains, priorities, values, and preferences.
Use thoughtfully-developed creative inspirations to prompt the imagination.
Organize and prioritize ideas based on desirability and feasibility.
Select ideas for further development.
Put a plan in place to test, develop and launch.
With just six steps, it sounds easy. The truth is that it’s not necessarily hard, but there are critical points where things can go wrong and it can spin out of control if it’s not facilitated effectively. What this means to you is that if you need good ideas, you need an approach that really works.
A Spark Session is a fast and effective way to make progress and engage your team. Here are some other benefits of this approach:
Generate innovative ideas rooted in customer values
Help team members develop empathy that leads to better customer service
A customer persona that frames your ideal target audience and their decision factors
Teambuilding, employee engagement, and skill development
Support your teams’ creative confidence
Participants learn repeatable exercises to use with other challenges
Click below to see a sample agenda and work through some prompt questions. Give yourself a chance to reflect on how your business could benefit when you make time to work on good ideas.
Here are a few more tips.
Narrow your audience. It’s really hard to come up with solutions that resonate if you try to please everyone. In the end, you’ll have a watered-down concept that isn’t very noteworthy. Winning ideas check all the boxes for a specific audience. Focus on the center of the bullseye. A broader audience may be interested too, once the solution has traction with your best audience.
Develop a customer persona. Brainstorming is fun and you can easily get carried away with ideas that appeal to the people in the room. Keep your ideal audience top of mind with a visual reminder that includes what’s most important and makes the customer feel good!
Use Creative Prompts. Creative thinking sometimes needs a jumpstart and that’s where tools like creative imitation are necessary. Prompts make the process easier by using familiar examples from other situations and reminding us of the customer’s preferences and priorities.
Organize and Prioritize. Once you get a pile of interesting ideas, you’ve got to process them before you leave the room. Combining and building upon loosely defined or wild ideas will drive you toward ideas that are more meaningful and feasible.
Vote for the best. To wrap up your session, narrow the field and find out what people in the room will get behind. You don’t have to commit right then and there, but to maintain momentum, select at least a few strong options.
Make a plan. After you leave the room, you’ll need time to process the outcomes. No good idea is fully formed from the start. The last step in Align’s Spark Session is a debrief meeting with a roadmap showing how to convert the ideas into a full-fledged solution.
Spark Sessions are a highly affordable way to bring more innovation to your business, get employees engaged and inspired, and generate promising solutions that will bring real business value.
Click here to schedule a meeting with our lead strategist, Jen Reiner, to explore a tailored program for your needs.