Successful Virtual Ideation
All innovation starts with an idea in someone’s head. Or at least a kernel of an idea. Many entrepreneurs take their own idea and talk to friends & family to test it out and improve it in their discussions. Most CPG companies use a variety of more formal research tools to extract & hone a set of ideas that could turn into innovations that drive incremental growth for a specific part of their business or with a new target audience.
One way to get a bunch of ideas out of a group of people’s heads is to hold an Ideation (a/k/a Brainstorming) session. These can take any number of forms – they can be internal to a company, they can be external with a target group of consumers, and they can be a mix of both. Typically, they’re held in person in some fun offsite (read cool, hip, creative) facility. There are great snacks & food to keep people’s energy levels up. There are fun stimuli (toys, fidgets, cool art…) around for people to play with. One challenge of the Covid era is that we had to stop gathering in groups like this, and like everything else, ideation needed to go virtual. How to re-create all that fun, creative, inspiring stuff in a virtual set-up?
Recently, we facilitated a virtual ideation session for one of our clients that turned out to be the most prolific session we’ve ever had. And we did it without all the bells & whistles that many researchers have come to believe are important to spark creativity and put people in the mood to brainstorm all day. I’ve extracted a few key lessons from this experience:
1. We’ve all gotten really accustomed to virtual meeting tools and they’re no longer a barrier to anything. Zoom, Google Meet, Teams… you name it, we’ve all been on them this year.
2. There is upside to people being in the comfort of their own homes (with their own snacks) during an ideation session. They’re less on the spot than in these “be creative” spaces, they may be wearing their comfy pants, and they’re still able to focus on the task at hand.
3. The ideation exercises (still) need to be very focused. Limit the pie in the sky, boil the ocean type stuff and give people a tight spec to go work on for a short duration of time.
4. There are real benefits to having a professional facilitate each breakout group. Often when in-person, the assignment includes “pick a scribe for your group” and the facilitators are moving around between breakout groups. In this virtual version, we had a Mission Field facilitator in each breakout room who acted as the scribe and moderator. We found that helped keep the group on track and ultimately got a lot more ideas onto paper.
5. For a virtual session, include more people in the breakout groups than you normally would. Inevitably, people need to come in & out of the session for some reason – another call, a crying child, etc. If you have a slightly larger group than you would normally, then it’s not so disruptive to lose 1 or 2 for a few minutes or for a whole exercise and it doesn’t put undue pressure on the participants who are still working on the exercise.
6. Last but not least, you still need to shift people around and re-mix the groups every so often. We typically do that every 2-3 exercises.
While we all look forward to the day when we can gather in person again, there’s no reason to put off your ideation work any longer. You really can have very productive virtual ideation sessions. As always, we’re happy to help with all of your front-end innovation challenges, including ideation work. Reach out to any of us to discuss how Mission Field can help your team stay on track with reaching your innovation goals in 2021.