Developing good ideas is central to the success of any ecommerce business, but the process can feel elusive. How, for instance, do you even come up with new ideas, much less tell a good one from a bad one?
“In a great team, you argue about ideas totally independent of ego. In great teams, the success of your idea is independent from your success. Just helping to find the best idea matters,” Shopify founder and CEO Tobias Lütke says. This quote highlights how important it is for entrepreneurs to set up the right teams and processes for ideation.
Specific ideation techniques can help to improve your problem-solving skills and creative thinking when generating ideas. Read on to learn more about some of the most popular ideation techniques, as well as strategies for how to prepare your next brainstorming session.
What is ideation?
Ideation is the process of generating, culling, and refining new ideas to solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity. This process requires communication, creativity, and problem-solving skills to generate innovative solutions for a particular objective. For example, an ecommerce merchant uses the ideation process when creating a new product line or developing a new content marketing strategy.
Stages of ideation
Ideation is the third phase of the design thinking process, a framework for developing creativeideas. When put together, these are all the stages of the process:
1. Empathize. This phase involves gaining a clear understanding of your customers’ experiences and needs.
2. Define. At this stage, set clear goals for an innovation or development based on the needs of your customers.
3. Ideate. The ideation phase consists of gathering as many possible solutions to a problem or opportunity through a variety of ideation techniques.
4. Prototype. This stage involves creating a virtual or physical version of your solution to test and improve.
5. Release, observe, and restart. This final stage consists of releasing a version of your idea to customers, observing how it performs and how customers respond, and starting on new ideas or improvements based on their feedback.
How to prepare for an ideation session
- Set clear goals
- Perform market research
- Organize a diverse group of participants
- Consider your environment
- Establish a process
These steps can prepare you for a productive ideation session:
1. Set clear goals
Develop a clear problem statement to define an issue you want to solve or an opportunity you want to explore. For example, you might want to generate new ideas for cosmetic products, decide how you’d like to launch your own subscription box service, or establish a design challenge for improving the user experience on your ecommerce store.
Whatever your focus, define explicit goals to keep your ideation sessions on track and help guide everyone toward the same target.
2. Perform market research
Before your ideation session, prepare market research materials about your industry, business, and target audience. Use quantitative research from sales, marketing, and other ecommerce analytics channels, as well as qualitative research like customer feedback from surveys and interviews.
Pull data that directly applies to the goals of your ideation session to stay focused. One of the benefits of using an ecommerce platform like Shopify is that it comes with integrated analytics reporting that lets you pick and choose which customer behavior trends to zero in on.
3. Organize a diverse group of participants
Ideation sessions are only as creative and productive as the people involved. Select a team of individuals with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and skill sets to contribute ideas. A team that includes too many members with a similar perspective runs the risk of failing to think outside the box. Bringing together people with widely varying views can help keep your ideation process fresh and challenge assumptions made by those too close to the topic.
Strike a balance between inviting enough participants to generate quality ideas while avoiding having too many cooks in the kitchen. For a small business, a group of two to eight people typically suffices.
For example, you could include two team members from your customer service department and two software engineers to contribute to an ideation session about how to improve the user experience (UX) design of your website.
4. Consider your environment
The space where your ideation session takes place has a huge impact on its outcome. Whether you’re holding a virtual or in-person ideation session, explore ways to make the space more conducive to creativity and productivity. For example, you could hold an ideation session in a new co-working space with your team rather than at your regular office.
Make tools available for your team to use, like whiteboards, pens and paper, and reports with relevant information. If you’re hosting a virtual ideation session, set up a collaborative online system for taking and editing notes remotely. Google Docs and Slack are both examples of online tools that can facilitate remote ideation sessions.
5. Establish a process
To facilitate productive ideation sessions, communicate your goals, set ground rules for the process, and outline the ideation methods you’ll use. Disorganized brainstorming sessions can easily become unfocused and unproductive; develop a clear framework for generating ideas and winnowing down only the good ideas.
Determine who will be in charge of managing the session and keeping it on track. Make sure everyone involved understands the purpose and process of your session and has enough advance notice to prepare. For example, you could establish a procedure that involves brainstorming new product ideas on a whiteboard before the group votes on which ideas to pursue.
Best ideation techniques
Here are some specific ideation techniques to consider using with your team during your next ideation session:
Brainstorming
One of the most popular ideation techniques is a traditional brainstorming session, which involves a group of people generating as many ideas and solutions as possible for a particular topic. During these brainstorming sessions, avoid evaluating or judging any ideas at first; the point is to create an open and creative space where innovative and unexpected ideas are welcome.
There are several ways to organize brainstorming sessions, including a round-robin structure. Simply ask each team member to contribute one idea after another until you have enough ideas to start working with. Alternatively, conduct a brainwriting exercise where one member writes down ideas and then passes them to another member to contribute to or edit.
Reverse thinking
One of the more unconventional ideation methods is called reverse thinking or inversion. This technique involves exploring, defining, and imagining the exact opposite of an ideal outcome. By using an ideation technique that helps you identify the worst possible idea for your topic, you can learn more about obvious pitfalls to avoid when seeking the right idea.
For example, when ideating how to improve customer service, you could explore the worst possible customer service interactions you can imagine and work backward from there to come up with ideas that steer clear of those big mistakes.
SCAMPER
Another one of the most common ideation techniques is called SCAMPER, which is an acronym that stands for substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to another use, eliminate, and rearrange. Each of these words represents a prompt that you can use to think creatively and challenge assumptions about a particular topic.
- Substitute: This asks what aspects of your problem or opportunity could be replaced with others, like substituting new product photos for old ones when considering how to increase online store traffic.
- Combine: Ask yourself if you could combine different strategies, products, or ideas to create an innovative solution to your problem.
- Adapt: This involves exploring if you can redefine existing solutions or apply past ideas you’ve used successfully to a new problem.
- Modify: You can focus on ways to modify and improve existing products, services, or strategies.
- Put to another use: When developing a new product line, consider alternative uses to identify opportunities you haven’t considered.
- Eliminate: What aspects of your topic can you reduce, simplify, or eliminate? Ask yourself what is the simplest solution to your particular problem, or the most essential version of your product or service.
- Rearrange: Consider how different orders or arrangements of a particular solution can result in different outcomes, such as experimenting with different arrangements for your checkout flow.
Creative pause
Generating ideas in a concentrated brainstorming session can be productive, but it can also put too much pressure on team members and stymie their creativity. One of the potential solutions for this problem is a creative pause, which involves a deliberate interruption of your brainstorming session with activities like going on a walk outside or listening to music. Another creative pause tactic is to stop your session for the day and resume the next morning after some sleep.
Beyond the utility of recharging your creative energy, the creative pause method can inspire ideas that spring up organically outside of the traditional brainstorming framework. Keep a journal or tablet nearby when you take creative pauses and set a schedule that establishes creative pauses as part of your daily routine.
Mind mapping
Mind mapping is a visual technique for forming ideas and developing questions related to a particular topic. The technique involves placing your single problem or opportunity in the middle of a diagram and building an expansive structure that naturally grows from that point with additional elements and subcategories for the topic.
Mind mapping is a particularly useful method for simplifying a complex problem by breaking it down into its key parts. For example, an ecommerce merchant could use mind mapping to understand the elements of a particular supply chain issue affecting their business.
Ideation FAQ
What is an example of ideation?
An example of ideation in ecommerce would be an entrepreneur who organizes a brainstorming session to identify how to improve an existing product line.
What is ideation thinking?
Ideation thinking is the process of generating, culling, and refining new ideas to find a creative answer to a problem or a way to pursue a new opportunity. By challenging assumptions and pushing boundaries, ecommerce merchants can develop innovative ways to sell products or services online.
Are there any next steps following ideation?
Within the design thinking framework, the stage after ideation involves prototyping a virtual or physical version of the idea to test out. After testing your idea and modifying it according to user feedback, you can release it and observe its impact on your business.
What is the ideation process?
The ideation process involves coming up with new ideas through a creative process of brainstorming, mind mapping, and other ideation techniques.