My experience of generating ideas
March 13, 2019In my current role as a marketing manager I have been working with ideas generation in a format of organising internal brainstorming sessions. There were several situations when we were looking into finding a good name for a product/service and were using internal resources for generating ideas. The generation took place in a brainstorming meeting where employees of different age and professions from various departments were invited. A product/service description was assigned and the participants had to write down individually as many names as they thought would suit to the product. Afterwards we put all ideas on the board and assessed these using rating system in order to choose some favorites. I am not sure if this actually could be called idea generation, but instead a simple brainstorming.
In my previous working experience with idea generation as a brand manager I was responsible for finding new products for NPD. This is a systematic idea generation where firstly market trends are investigated, various market and customer surveys are conducted including focus groups. Here we combine end user and expert inputs in order to find a best solution. We also checked other industries and same industry in other countries to get inspiration. The inspiration came from market intelligence and was a responsibility of a brand manager to assess new ideas and drive the implementation in the organisation.
When it comes to idea generation for this module, I discussed firstly the given challenge with family members to get their views and insights. I see myself as an end user facing this real challenge every day and tried to think what could help me to face it. I do not have any expert knowledge or technical knowledge therefore some of my ideas might not be possible to produce. I personally get most creative when walking in the nature or in the late evenings before falling asleep. There the most great ideas and solutions come to my head 😊 The theme chosen for idea generation definitely affected the process as I am myself a daily user of social media, so it was easy to relate myself to the challenge and I found it interesting to think about possible solutions. At the same time taking only my personal perspective limited the creativity, so therefore I took inputs from my family members to broaden the view. In the end it was a great task that I enjoyed a lot, and it also proved that coming up with great new ideas for real today challenges is not the easiest task.