Advice, tips and inspiration to help you perform at your best
In the past, I’ve shared three essential creative exercises for innovation workshops. In case you’re looking for more exercises that will help you generate new ideas, here are three more. They’re just as useful.
In a previous post I wrote about how to inject creativity into strategy workshops. Now I’m going to discuss ways you can make your creative workshops more strategic. This doesn’t mean losing the energy and spontaneity required for creative sessions. It just ensures that the ideas you generate are purposeful and on brief. Here’s some suggestions on how to do this.
Given all the restrictions we’re living with, one of the key challenges for facilitators is how to create the same buzz as face to face sessions. This is particularly important in innovation workshops, where spontaneity and energy are vital. Like everybody else, I’ve had to adapt. Having planned and run a few online innovation sessions, here’s what I believe are the key tools and platforms you need.
New ideas emerge by making random connections. You observe something over here, you observe something completely unrelated over there. You then bring the two together to produce something new and different. It’s this unique combination that forms the basis of something fresh. It’s why it’s called lateral thinking.
In the marketing world, there are 2 types of workshop we’re asked to facilitate - the creative and the strategic. Creative workshops are all about idea generation - new products, services, names, communications. Strategic sessions are about planning and making decisions. Sometimes you can combine a bit of both, eg creating brand positioning, but they do tend to focus on one or the other.
Idea generation sessions are the workshops I enjoy the most. I love the buzz, the energy and it’s so satisfying to go through the journey of inventing something new. If you were to simply walk into an idea generation session, it may appear chaotic with post-its, magazines, random products and objects strewn all over the place. However, the best sessions are really well organised. Of course they need to be planned properly, but once this is done, this is how you structure them.
