In today’s fast paced, high stakes business environment, where budgets are tighter than ever, finding the time and dedicating the resources needed for generating breakthrough product ideas can be very challenging. Many companies we’ve worked with either have no process in place or rely on internal brainstorming to come up with their next product ideas.

As we know, brainstorming sessions often include a variety of stakeholders. Our academic colleague, Jacob Goldenberg, points out in his book “Inside the Box,” that a better approach to coming up with new ideas is to brainstorm on your own independently, and then bring ideas to the drawing board anonymously for further discussion and feedback. 

 

In addition, while ideation brainstorming sessions often draw upon a wealth of information and trends accumulated via various types of past research, it is difficult to come up with product ideas that are truly new. Thus, most efforts result in close-in modifications or adaptations to existing offers.

 

However, there are some key advantages to such a process as well. Likely, the most important of those is early stakeholder engagement. Having the team onboard early and throughout the process certainly increases your odds of success, and those odds increase even more when consumers are also included early in the process.