During the Ideation process, I personally found brainstorming ideas rather challenging. I think this could be attributed to the fact that in every other class I’ve taken here at college the only thing I’ve really had to brainstorm are paper topics. Aside from that, there have been minimal creative juices flowing over the past four years, which is sad to admit.
When I was brainstorming, I found it particularly hard to create ideas that “would make your boss fire you” or the really outlandish ones. It’s so much easier to think of safe and practical ideas, ones that you know will work even if the end product is not the most exciting, because it is more comfortable and easy to do so. When I’m brainstorming paper topics it never crosses my mind to come up with multiple crazy ideas. I find the one I think is best and work off of it. From now on I’m going to try to implement this process into outlining my papers to see if I can come up with more creative and interesting topics, because it really helped to come up with creative product/service ideas.
The process of “mining” ideas, after creating the outlandish ones, was a really helpful step because it let me see the way a crazy idea could become feasible with a few tweaks. I think this is a really important step to have in the Ideation process because it allows you to see that even the ideas you think are absurd could be implemented with a few simple changes. Even when the ideas are so crazy, like for example: a pill sharing service, they can be adjusted to become reasonable and feasible ideas. Our groups “mined” this idea by creating a variety of pill dispensing options like: allowing the pharmacy to dispense any quantity (within reason) of a pill you need, implementing pill dispensing machines in local stores (like Earth Fare has for nuts), and creating a monthly subscription service for frequently used pills (like Zyrtec). Even though the idea sounded super out there to begin with, we were able to come up with more feasible ideas because of the initial one.
Overall, even though the Ideation process was initially difficult for me, I think it paid off and the results from the prototyping stage will be better because of the mindset it created.