When do You Get Great Ideas?

When a Great Idea Pops up in your Head

Looking for new solutions, we brainstorm a lot. Getting together to generate new ideas for urgent challenges. And when it's done professionally we even get a lot of ideas. But are they our best ones? That's the question. Brainstorming is under a lot of criticism these days. Is this tool giving us the best ideas possible? Do we do it the right way?

Let's take a step back. And take a look at our personal life. You remember for sure some AHA moments; those moments when a great idea pops up in your head. Everybody has them. Interesting is when does this happen? When I ask this question to an audience in my speeches in Asia I get answers like:

• When I am jogging.
• Driving my car.
• Doing nothing.
• When I wake up.
• Under the shower.

What strikes me most is that hardly anyone ever says "in a brainstorm" or "at my desk". It seems that if we STOP thinking, our best ideas pop into our minds. In my profession this is called incubation. It is defined as "a process of unconscious recombination of thought elements that were stimulated through conscious work at one point in time, resulting in novel ideas at some later point in time". That explains why when you participate in a brainstorm, you still get new ideas weeks later.

If it takes time to get our best ideas you should plan an incubation period between defining your challenge and sharing ideas on this with others who are involved. I have developed a structured method to start innovation in which incubation has an explicit role. In the FORTH innovation methodology there's a step of 'Observe and Learn' between the kick-off in step one and the ideation workshop in step three. At the kick-off you share the business challenge. In the 6-week-'Observe and Learn'-phase you get new insights and ideas at those odd moments. In the ideation workshop in step 3 'Raise Ideas' you will share these ideas and focus on selecting the best ideas to work out as concrete concepts.

So in 'Observe and Learn' you go out yourself exploring opportunities, discovering new trends and technologies and identifying relevant customer frictions. During your activities you have an 'Observe & Learn' booklet at hand to write down everything which comes to your mind: Ideas of course!

Do you recognize these AHA moments, jogging or under the shower? I am especially curious if we have the same AHA moments on different continents and in different cultures. I would love to make a long list of them and publish them in a next blog. So you could do me a great favor sharing "at which moments I get great ideas" .Thank you so much.