Innovation Catalyst - The Design Brief 

There is a new focus for innovation – and it is called design thinking. It is all about breaking down the organizational silos and making everyone in the company responsible for innovation. One of the chief proponents is Tim Brown - CEO and president of IDEO and author of Change by Design

Tim Brown is an industrial designer by training, and has won numerous design awards. His team even appeared on a news show, demonstrating how to create a new and improved shopping cart in just 4 days. His passion is finding ways design can be used to promote the well being of people living in emerging economies. [In fact, many innovative ideas are being created by focusing on these emerging economies].

He says one of the keys to great ideation is great preparation . And great preparation begins with a design brief. Here he captures the power in his own words:

“The difference between a design brief with just the right level of constraint and one that is overly vague or overly restrictive can be the difference between a team on fire with breakthrough ideas and one that delivers a tired reworking of existing ones.”

And I have found this to be true in my work facilitating innovation sessions, though it may seem counter-intuitive. Often, the clients I work with say they want the brainstorming session to be very broad because they want to "empower" the participants. In fact the opposite tends to happen. When the "creativity canvas" is too wide, it actually either leads to too many ideas that are off the mark and not actionable or too many ideas that do not address the most critical challenges.

As Brown says above, with just the right ending to the sentence - "How might we..." - you too can catch your team on fire with creativity aimed in the right direction!