Generating New Business Ideas and Strategies

Idea Generation & Strategy Definition Workshop

We provide highly focussed workshops to generate ideas, crystallise needs and formulate strategy.  Our workshops have three phases:

Phase 1 - Exploration

This phase involves identifying objectives, then framing issues & problems.  We will already have identified key issues through the various pre-workshop interviews. The workshop builds on this and achieves consensus for the way forward.  One of many exercises we conduct is as follows: we set a scene where people talk about the challenge at hand.  We then task others to ask “dumb” questions, or take actions that take the original problem in a new direction.  Meanwhile, the audience part of the group making observation notes.  When the exercise is over, we do a structured debrief around the scene and chart a divergent set of objectives, we list facts, feelings, and discuss problem frames.  We then narrow these lists down through dialogue, clustering, and voting.

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Phase 2 - Idea Generation

This phase produces ideas to answer or solve the identified needs and issues.  Using the principles of “Yes, And”, our approach takes participants to a more playful and open-minded space. We use exercises that stimulate spontaneity and collaboration.  Each exercise creates the stimuli, and the rest of group make observations of what’s going on.  These observations are sometimes random thoughts, sometimes questions, and sometimes ideas that directly address what we’re trying to accomplish.  These exercises take people away from the typical way of thinking about something.  They provide an avenue for more spontaneous or tangential thinking.  This “new” thinking is then harnessed by the whole group as launch pads, or starting points for new ideas – or the next iteration of an idea.

Phase 3 - Idea Filtering & Action Planning

This requires judgment and analytical thinking. The group are tasked with weeding out and then refining the most feasible ideas and strategies.