Generating Innovative Concepts: The Limits of Divergence

The success of an innovation project depends on two things: the quality of the initial concept and the quality of its implementation.

The challenge of coming up with good ideas

When it comes to execution, Lean Startup and Agile have emerged in recent years as the preferred approaches; but we’ll address that topic in a future article. What we’ll focus on today is the first step: finding the right idea—a phase that is essential to the success of truly meaningful innovations.

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This raises two main questions:

• What is “the good idea”?
• How do you come up with good ideas?

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This challenging phase of idea generation and selection has been studied for years; it is sometimes referred to as the “fuzzy front end” of the innovation process, to highlight its somewhat unstructured and complex nature.

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In response to these two questions, numerous methods for generating ideas—generally referred to as “creativity” methods—have emerged in recent years.

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These methods are primarily designed to generate ideas through brainstorming that is more or less structured at the outset (divergent phase); then to select, from among the ideas generated, those that appear to be the most promising (convergent phase).

Creativity techniques for generating lots of ideas

How do you come up with a “good idea”? Many creativity methods are based on a fairly simple answer: generate lots of ideas. The most extreme method in this regard—unstructured brainstorming—is based on the principle that quantity leads to quality. Most methods, however, provide some initial structure.

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Thus, Design Thinking (the most well-known and widely used approach) suggests starting with a phase of observing users and/or non-users in order to better understand their challenges and issues.

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But in the end, we end up with dozens, if not hundreds, of ideas, among which the best possible idea may be hiding—and we’ll have to identify it.

The Search for THE Perfect Idea

Once all these ideas have been generated, how do you identify which one is THE best idea? As Burkus points out in an article in the Harvard Business Review, in times of uncertainty, companies face a serious problem in recognizing good ideas and tend to reject ideas that could actually give them a significant competitive advantage.

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Some methods aim to guide the evaluation of ideas. For example, Design Thinking proposes three criteria: desirability (market), feasibility (technical), and viability (economic). However, the assessment of these criteria remains the sole responsibility of the decision-makers. There is no objective way to identify, among the ideas generated, which one is the best and deserves to be developed.

Methods that ultimately prove ineffective

Ultimately, how can we be sure we haven’t missed that stroke of genius at any of these stages?

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Furthermore, let’s assume for a moment that the right idea is not only generated but also correctly identified. The resources required to achieve this result are significant: the time and personnel needed to generate ideas, then to determine the selection criteria, and finally to evaluate all the ideas generated. Remember, most divergent methods rely on a large number of generated ideas, thereby multiplying the resources needed to evaluate them.

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Isn't there a more efficient approach that would increase the likelihood of coming up with THE right idea without wasting resources?

Toward a New Approach: The Impact Model

We believe such an approach exists. To overcome the limitations of divergent methods, this approach is convergent by nature. By “convergent,” we mean that it first defines what characterizes THE right idea before moving on to the ideation phase.

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This approach, developed by Dynergie R&D over the past three years, is called theImpact Model, and has already been used for dozens of projects. We’ll outline the key points of this approach in an upcoming article!

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Sources:

On the complexity of the idea-generation phase:

^{1. Felin, T., Gambardella, A., Stern, S., & Zenger, T. (2020). Lean startup and the business model: Experimentation revisited. Long Range Planning, 53(4), 101889. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lrp.2019.06.002}

^{2. Khurana, A., & Rosenthal, S. R. (1998). Towards Holistic “Front Ends” in New Product Development. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 15(1), 57–74. https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-5885.1510057Keupp, M. M., Palmié, M., & Gassmann, O. (2012). The Strategic Management of Innovation: A Systematic Review and Paths for Future Research: Strategic Management of Innovation. International Journal of Management Reviews, 14(4), 367–390. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2370.2011.00321.x}

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On the limitations of current methods for generating and selecting the “right idea”:

^{3. Burkus, D. (2013). Innovation Isn’t an Idea Problem. Harvard Business Review, 23, 2014. https://hbr.org/2013/07/innovation-isnt-an-idea-probleChulvi, V., González-Cruz, M. C., Mulet, E., & Aguilar-Zambrano, J. (2013). Influence of the type of idea-generation method on the creativity of solutions. Research in Engineering Design, 24(1), 33–41. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00163-012-0134-0}

^{4. Chulvi, V., Mulet, E., Chakrabarti, A., López-Mesa, B., & González-Cruz, C. (2012). Comparison of the degree of creativity in design outcomes using different design methods. Journal of Engineering Design, 23(4), 241–269. https://doi.org/10.1080/09544828.2011.624501}