Business Ideation Jam

The Business Ideation Jam is a workshop format that helps you and your (client) team ideate around novel product and service ideas - in an energizing, creative and yet structured way.

Arriving to relevant product and service ideas can be challenging even for versed innovation teams. Conflicting priorities, messy structures, or simply not enough sharp ideas are just some of the hurdles you might have. This workshop flow helps your team come up with a set of promising product/service ideas in an energizing yet structured way. It offers a straightforward approach to 1) reviewing and enriching existing knowledge, 2) ideating lots of fresh new ideas collaboratively, and finally 3) conceptualizing the most promising ones into tangible drafts that can be challenged, validated, or taken further to prototyping.

Step 1: Intro

This part is simply used to set the stage - rules of the workshop, agenda, and so on. You can use playful ways to let the participants introduce themselves, such as an ice-breaker template.

Step 2: Context

There are different ways to go about such a jam. The one illustrated here involves preparation and research upfront, e.g. a quick inspirational research on potentially interesting target groups, or/and a set of opportunities you have synthesized. Together with your participants, you can expand on those findings, map them out and prioritize them.

Step 3: Ideate

This is the really fun part! Using the previous section as the springboard for your ideation session, you can now start formulating your opportunities into challenge statements, and kick-off creativity!

We have included a set of tried and tested methods that can be used as warm-ups upon the beginning of the ideation session, or that can help you enrich first ideas by developing on top of each other.

Finally, after a lot of free abundant ideation iterations, you might want to circle 1 or 2 and continue with developing an actual concept around it. To this end, we have developed a specific template you can use here as well: the Concept Card.

Step 4: Outro

Finally, the selected favorites will be scrutinized by the group to tease key assumptions and design experiments to test them for next steps.