While participants might have the potential to contribute great ideas for ways to solve your problem, sometimes they might be too constrained in their thinking or might feel that they lack inspiration. The tools in this activity provide ways of helping people gain inspiration from areas outside of their everyday experience and to encourage fresh thinking on a given subject.
There are a number of research methods used for gaining inspiration ways in which users are already responding to a problem. In the Search stage, we provide guidance on approaches such as Positive Deviance, Appreciative Inquiry and the Lead User methodology. You may have found solutions that did not fit your problem well enough to be adopted and adapted, but did have good features that might be part of a potential solution. We encourage you to use insights and examples found through your search process to provide inspiration idea generation.
Innovation has frequently been inspired by experiences and observations made in one context or industry that have been re-imagined to solve a similar problem in a very different environment. In an article for Hype Innovation, John Bessant outlines the power of ‘recombinant innovation’ as a way to drive impactful innovations by gaining inspiration from others. The following exercises provide further options for sparking inspiration.