Ideation

Ideation is a group process.

An idea comes from an individual - credit has to be given there. But, i prevail upon it because it is refined upon by a group that can critically think about the process and improve upon it iteratively. Thereby lending a new perspective to the raw format that the idea took shape from originally.

Thomas Edison had a 12 member team with whose help he was able to create the light bulb and go onto building it into a commercial success. Thus, that particular spark that some guy had sitting in a corner was brilliant - but it was built upon and therefore evolved into something more solid and commercial.

Thus, ideation too may not have its Eureka moments, there are more subtle changes that come to the surface to form concrete ideas.

Which brings me to the fact that brainstorming (the most flogged term in corporate circles and fast turning into favourite middle and top management level jargon) gains ultimate importance. Brainstorming helps in ideating much better than anything else. There is a rider though, ideation is a chaotic process, the more the number of people, higher is the probability that a good idea would be lost if not scribbled down somewhere.

Informal setting is the best way to bring out excellent ideas. My team was faced with a stiff deadline in one of our projects and were running way behind schedule. We had popularly earned the title of ' bottleneck' in the project. We got together all our people in a room and informally started discussing workarounds to get the work out as required. Some good ideas came to us and we decided to go ahead and implement one of them. We brought all the requisite infrastructure together and despite our modest manpower we defeated Goliath ultimately.

We were not hung up on who talks, who listens, who interjects. It was an open discussion involving all and turned out to be fruitful.

After brainstorming, though, comes the implementation. The devil is in the details. Putting down a process, a road map to the intended end result and seeing it through requires some perspiration. The tools can be perfected upon as you go along; simply because taking in all project related environmental factors together would be next to impossible. And thereby an evolving road map is a 'good to go'. This is especially true for any work with a tight deadline (lets face it, when are deadlines not tight?). IDEO's shopping trolley concept is a case in point. http://extra.shu.ac.uk/dac/ideo.pdf

So personally, ideation is not the forte of scientists and engineers, you and me thinking together could produce intelligence. It is just a matter of thinking in the correct format.

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