Stage 3, concept generation, is really part of the fun part or one of the fun parts of
the Biodesign process. Once you have one or two or a handful of needs, that the key is
to really go wild and brainstorm. Really bring out the creative juices of the team and all
of the members and the different backgrounds they bring.
This is a time to kind of let it fly for lateral thinking, for rapid pace. Get as many ideas
going as you possibly can. The brainstorming process can be a lot of
fun. We typically try to encourage as wacky of ideas as possible, which is really exciting
‘cause nothing you say is ever wrong. You have to really transition from this very
critical headspace into a very open headspace. We started brainstorming when we were down
to four needs. We set aside two to three brainstorming sessions for each of these needs and out of
each of those sessions we’d come up with maybe 50 or 100 different ideas of how we
could solve the problem. To get pumped up for brainstorming, we had
a lot of coffee. Some days we brought in cookies. Lots of caffeine, lots of sugar is what you
need. We stood up, that was key us. We actually
did cheer early on to get us really fired up to brainstorm, so that helped .
We did try to follow the general rules of brainstorming from the book.
For me sometimes deferring judgment was really difficult because it’s easy to see how things
might not work. Be free with what you think may solve it,
even if it makes no sense, because the idea is, in a creative session, other people may
build upon what you say. I think one conversation at a time, so this
is the most important. there are different ways of approaching brainstorming.
There’s the well-mannered build on the ideas of others. That works really well, especially
if it’s a team that’s new to each other. we did a lot of “yes, and,” we made sure
that we didn’t shoot down our teammate’s ideas…. But there are lots of different
ways to do it. You can brainstorm on your own. You can brainstorm with a group of colleagues
who are very critical who will tell you when you’re off track. All of these techniques
work depending on the group, so you just have to figure out which kind is the best for you.
Our team found that a mix was good. Usually kind of the high level, all ideas are good
ideas initially was kind of a good way to get it started, but then be more kinda questioning
and trying to dig into the details with a little bit more kind of a critical eye.
before meeting for brainstorming, we used to understand the problem very well, and one
of us would take a lead or would be a facilitator for brainstorming session and he would decompose
a problem into different sub-problems, and then we will try to solve different sub-problems
First, in the early brainstorming sessions, we just did our team. Later on, we brought
in subject matter experts when we figured out where we, there were holes in our understanding
of concept or of problem. So if you invite people from outside, they
won’t have that biased view of looking at the problem.
After a brainstorming session, we would record all of our data in Mind Map and then it’s
really easy to see where you focused in that session and you can see holes. That was a
good way to point us to where we should brainstorm more in the future.
So it’s a little bit tricky to go from 100 ideas to try to figure out which few you really
want to investigate further to take forward. One touchstone is go back to your needs criteria.
So look at what you specified that an ideal solution has to have and use that as an initial
filter. Most important for innovation, keep in mind
is that even if they have some concepts that sound really fantastic, and are very interesting
and that the team really loves, they should not go back and try to tweak or massage their
must-have criteria or needs statement to enable those concepts to go forward.
we compared all our concepts to our needs criteria and from there we were able to get
rid of a lot. our strategy became let the concepts compete
against each other and try and identify weaknesses in the concepts, so we knew which ones to
spend our time on. So, hopefully, after you compare against the
needs specification, your list of dozens or hundreds is narrowed down to a much smaller,
more manageable number.