Tools for creating ideas

 

Here are tools for creating ideas, either individually or with other people.

• Absence Thinking: Think about what is not there.
• Art streaming: Keep creating until you get through the blocks.
• Assumption Busting: Surfacing and challenging unconscious assumptions.
• Attribute Listing: Listing attributes of objects and then challenging them.
• Brainstorming: The classic creative method for groups.
• Braindrawing: Good for reticent groups.
• Brainmapping: Combining brainwriting and mind-mapping.
• Brainwriting: Group doodling for non-verbal stimulation.
• Breakdown: Careful decomposition to explore the whole system.
• Challenge: Challenge any part of the problem.
• Crawford Slip Method: Getting ideas from a large audience.
• A Day In The Life Of...: Building creative tension from contextualized situations.
• Delphi Method: Explore ideas or gain consensus with remote group.
• Doodling: Let your subconscious do the drawing.
• Essence: Looking elsewhere whilst retaining essential qualities.
• Forced Conflict: Using conflict to stimulate the subconscious.
• Guided Imagery: Letting your subconscious give you a message.
• How-How Diagram: Break down problem by asking 'how'.
• How to: Frame statements as 'How to' to trigger focused thinking.
• Incubation: Letting the subconscious do the work.
• The Kipling method (5W1H): Ask simple questions for great answers.
• Lateral thinking: Thinking sideways to create new ideas.
• Lotus Blossom: Unfold the flower of extended ideas.
• Chunking: Go up and then down elsewhere.
• Mind-mapping: Hierarchical breakdown and exploration.
• Modeling: For the artist in everyone.
• Morphological Analysis: Forcing combinations of attribute values.
• Nominal Group Technique: Getting ideas with minimal personal interaction.
• Pause: Think more deeply for a minute.
• Post-Up: Brainstorming with Post-It Notes.
• Provocation: Shake up the session by going off-piste.
• PSI: Problem + Stimulus = Idea!
• Random Words: Using a random word as a stimulus.
• Rightbraining: Combine incomplete doodles around the problem.
• Role-play: Become other people. Let them solve the problem.
• Remembrance: Remembering solutions not yet discovered.
• Reversal: Looking at the problem backwards.
• Reverse Brainstorming: Seek first to prevent your problem from happening.
• Rubber-ducking: Get someone else to listen to your talk.
• SCAMPER: Using action verbs as stimuli.
• Six Thinking Hats: Think comfortably in different ways about the problem.
• Storyboarding: Creating a visual story to explore or explain.
• Take a break: When creativity is fading.
• Talk streaming: Just talk and talk and talk until you unblock.
• TRIZ Contradiction Analysis: Use methods already used in many patents.
• Unfolding: Gradually unfolding the real problem from the outside.
• Value Engineering: Deep analysis to understand and innovate in areas of key value.
• Visioning: Creating a motivating view of the future.
• Wishing: State ideas as wishes to expand thinking.
• Write streaming: Write and write and write until you unblock.