Ideation

Level Up Your Business

Ideation is part of the design process. It’s where you create your focus on generating ideas!
It’s a 5-step process that you can use to impact the way you do business.

The ideation process is where you get to:

  • Challenge assumptions
  • Think outside the box
  • Explore new ideas

Ideation will help your business:

  • Step beyond the obvious solutions
  • Bring together the collective strengths of your team
  • Uncover new innovations

All these items are crucial in stepping ahead of the competition in your business niche.

Ideation
Ideation

How Does Ideation Work:

Earlier we mentioned that Ideation is a 5-step process. Here’s how it all works:

Step 1: Empathise

All product and idea designs come from knowing your audience. The first stage of this process is to empathise with your audience, try to see things from their point of view. What pain points do they have? And how can you as a business step in to relieve those pain points?

If we had to sum this step up into a single line it would be:

Empathise with your audience to help define the problem you’re solving.

Step 2: Define

So, you’ve spent some time in your audience’s shoes. Now it’s time to narrow down the list of problems you’ve seen.

You need to define a problem statement in the way your audience would see it.

Without a defined problem you may find yourself wandering from your ideal language. That will definitely affect the profitability of your business.

Step 3: Ideate

Next up, it’s time to ideate.

You know how your audience thinks and feels, plus you’ve taken the time to define the problem they’re facing. Now it’s the fun step! You get to come up with ideas to solve the problem.

This is the most creative step. Think as out of the box as you can – coming up with as many different ideas as possible.

Don’t allow yourself to become fixated or stuck on one idea or way of doing things. Let your hair down and have fun with it.

Step 4: Prototype

After the Ideate step, you’ll have plenty of ideas to sort through.

Now is the time to find what you believe to be the best of those ideas and start getting them ready for testing!

Like Ideate was the most creative step, this is the most practical step, it’s where you get to bring your ideas to life.

Step 5: Test

With all the previous steps done, you’re on the final stage of the process. Now it’s time to test your ideas. In this blog, we’ve referred to this as a process but that’s not quite correct. Ideation is more of a lifecycle.

Testing reveals where you can improve, and the goal of finding that information is to then go ahead and improve upon your ideas and executions.

Ideation

Using ideation in your business:

The best and easiest way to start is by organising a brainstorming time for your business. Ideation is an important process, you don’t want to squish it into an hour. This is why we recommend setting aside a day. We got this idea from Nutmeg. They set aside an entire Ideation day.

Choose your day and put it on the calendar. Bonus – you get to save yourself the irritation of overwhelming email threads and confusion!

In Conclusion

As a business owner, you understand the importance of clarity. To run a successful business you need to know the ins and outs of your business.

Knowing your audience, what they respond to and why they respond to it is a key part of the marketing journey you are on. Ideation allows your business to make the most of every opportunity. It does this by allowing you to know exactly what you’re doing and who you’re helping!

If you want to learn more about Ideation then watch our #FinanceFriday videos. Click here to watch it! 

You can also check out our Social Media Posts from March! On Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn!

Watch Our March Videos:

We are now releasing #TuesdayTips every 2nd Tuesday! These videos will have helpful tips on the monthly topic!