Staring at a blank whiteboard waiting for a brilliant idea to strike? There are better ways to generate innovative concepts than traditional brainstorming—structured ideation techniques that actually help your brain make new connections.
Once you've mastered these methods, you'll want to act on your best ideas fast. That's where building with Adalo comes in—Adalo is a no-code app builder for database-driven web apps and native iOS and Android apps—one version across all three platforms, published to the Apple App Store and Google Play. When inspiration hits, you can launch an MVP quickly and reach the biggest possible audience through the app stores, complete with push notifications to keep users engaged.
Here are four ideation techniques designed to spark your next breakthrough.
Not to worry, you don’t need to be the next Einstein or some sort of prophet to get a new idea. Despite Hollywood depictions, ideas don’t just happen out of the blue. Even the famous eureka moment that started it all didn’t really come out of nowhere. The ancient Greek king, Hiero II, commissioned a new crown for himself, but when it was completed, he suspected that the goldsmith had cheated him by replacing some of the gold with silver. Unfortunately, he had no way to prove this, so he asked Archimedes for help. Archimedes mulled over this problem for quite a while until one evening, he settled into his tub for a soak. That’s when he noticed the water level rise. He realized that he could measure the volume of the crown by placing it in water. Once he knew the volume, he used the weight of the crown to determine if it was as dense as pure gold. (It wasn’t.) Archimedes didn’t come up with this innovation out of thin air. He did it by connecting two things that had never been connected before. And this is where all new ideas come from: combining concepts from things that already exist.
So rather than rely on conventional brainstorming, the next time you or your team need to come up with a bold new idea, try one of these methods, designed specifically to help your brain make new connections.
Ideation Techniques
Analogous Rex
This is a technique of analogies and metaphors. In it, you say your innovation problem is like a [ blank ] . And that blank could be anything, but it generally falls into two categories: random and context. Random is exactly what it sounds like, something totally unrelated to your innovation problem. Your problem could be like auto racing, or maybe it’s like ping pong, or maybe a volcano. Just pick something at random like, say, sunflowers, to the challenges you’re facing, like assigning nurses to patients in a hospital. Now, at first, you might think that sunflowers have absolutely nothing to do with nursing assignments, but if you think about it for awhile, you can come up with some interesting ideas. For instance, sunflowers are always facing the sun. They watch it; they pay attention to it. Maybe there's a way to make it easier for all the nurses to watch the patients that need the most attention. Context analogies fill in the blank by going with related to your problem. Maybe it’s similar to another problem you’ve solved before. Or maybe it's sort of like what a competitor has done. Whether your analogy is random or based on context, the key is what comes next. Once you have your analogy, you need to defend it. If you have a partner, you can ask them to play devil's advocate to question your analogy and force you to justify how it makes sense.
Mix Master
This is a fun one. New ideas come from combining two separate, and often highly dissimilar, concepts. In Mix Master, you do exactly this to generate new ideas. You actually take two unrelated ideas, mash them up, and then see how the new combination could help with your problem. So in this version, you would combine sunflowers and auto racing and then see what ideas that sparks for nursing assignments. So you might be wondering where you’re supposed to get the random concepts like sunflowers and auto racing. Well, there are actually a handful of dedicated apps for that (seriously, just search for “Idea Generator” in your favorite app store and see how many apps come up). In addition, going to random Wikipedia pages is a great way to come up with disparate topics. Board games with topic cards like Trivial Pursuit or Taboo are also fun, fast ways to generate lots of topics. Finally, you can ask your team to throw out a bunch of random topics before you begin your ideating. This can be a fun warm up exercise, and what’s more, your brain might pull a fast one and throw out a concept that it sees a hidden connection between it and the problem you’re trying to overcome.
Chart the Course
Alright, for all you chart and diagram nerds out there, this one’s for you. Chart the Course is a technique for turning your verbal understanding of your struggle into visual representations. This can be in the form of pie charts comparing the size of different aspects of the problem, or it can be in the form of a line chart that plots the amount of pain experienced over time. There’s no one diagram that’s going to give you the perfect idea every time. But converting your verbal understanding into a visual one is a great way to engage the automatic system in your brain. You may already be experiencing hunches about how you can best to innovate. These charts are a great way to illuminate these hunches and turn that inkling of a feeling into a fully-fledged idea.
Headhunter
In this exercise you pretend you’re a headhunter -- the best in the business. Big companies come to you all the time asking for help finding their next top executive. You’re the star in your field because you always find exactly the right person for what the company needed. But with this exercise, your client isn’t a big company; it’s the people you’re trying to help with your new innovation. So you need to come up with a job description for your innovation. What is it that needs to be done? These are the roles and responsibilities for the job you're hiring for. Once you have the job description, it can be easier to come up with an innovation that fits the bill.
For example - Wanted: an innovation to help people hang pictures on tall walls in their homes. Must be able to work over stair cases and be easily storable.
Once you have this job description, it’s much easier to think of potential candidates to fill the role. Maybe a hammer with an extendable handle. Maybe a precision nail gun. Maybe a ladder with adjustable legs. Maybe a picture frame with an adhesive back. Maybe a service where professionals hang the picture. By focusing on the job description, you can open your mind up to a plethora of diverse possibilities.
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These are just a few tactics to help generate new ideas in your pursuit to be more innovative. Check our next post where we cover four more ways to ideate that are better than brainstorming (including my favorite and an homage to Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Questions Only).
FAQ
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Can I easily implement ideation techniques in an app to help my team brainstorm? | Yes, with Adalo's No Code App Builder, you can easily create an app that incorporates ideation techniques like Analogous Rex, Mix Master, Chart the Course, and Headhunter. You can build features like random topic generators, visual charting tools, and collaborative brainstorming spaces without writing any code. |
| Why choose Adalo over other App Builder solutions? | Adalo is a no-code app builder for database-driven web apps and native iOS and Android apps—one version across all three platforms, published to the Apple App Store and Google Play. This cross-platform capability means you can bring your innovative ideas to life quickly and efficiently. Publishing to the app stores is key to marketing and distribution, which is often the hardest part of launching a new app or business—Adalo removes this barrier entirely, giving you a major advantage over competitors who struggle with the technical complexities of app store submissions. |
| What's the fastest way to build and publish an ideation and brainstorming app to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store? | Adalo is the fastest way to build and publish an ideation and brainstorming app to the Apple App Store and Google Play. With No Code App Builder's drag-and-drop interface and AI-assisted building, you can go from idea to published app in days rather than months. Adalo handles the complex App Store submission process, so you can focus on your app's features and user experience instead of wrestling with certificates, provisioning profiles, and store guidelines. |
| What is the key principle behind generating new ideas according to the article? | The article explains that all new ideas come from combining concepts from things that already exist. Like Archimedes connecting water displacement to measuring volume, innovation happens when you make connections between unrelated concepts rather than waiting for ideas to appear out of thin air. |
| How does the Mix Master ideation technique work? | Mix Master involves taking two unrelated ideas, mashing them together, and seeing how the new combination could help solve your problem. You can generate random concepts using idea generator apps, random Wikipedia pages, board games with topic cards, or by having your team brainstorm random topics before beginning the exercise. |
| What is the Headhunter technique and how can it help with innovation? | The Headhunter technique involves creating a job description for your innovation—defining what needs to be done, the roles, and responsibilities. By focusing on this job description rather than jumping straight to solutions, you open your mind to a wider range of diverse possibilities that could fill the role. |
| How can visual representations help with ideation? | The Chart the Course technique converts your verbal understanding of a problem into visual representations like pie charts or line graphs. This engages the automatic system in your brain and helps illuminate hunches you may already have, turning those inklings into fully-fledged ideas. |
