Idea Crafting - Maximizing the life of every idea

Idea Crafting

Leading Data and Content Provider: Crafting Ideas

Crafitti recently conducted a series of workshops for one of the world’s leading data and content providers to generate new solution directions and roadmaps for one of their business units.

More than 30 senior associates came together over 4 days to generate more than 300 ideas, later clustered into 5 key strategic initiatives.

The engagement started with an exploration workshop - 4 global scenarios were defined, the company's Value Net was articulated and the problem space was expanded in Space and Time using the System Operator from TRIZ. 6 distinct problem/ opportunity clusters emerged.

Teams were created to deep dive into each of the 6 problem clusters and generate ideas using a variety of Crafitt's inventive triggers - TRIZ, Lateral Thining, Vedic etc. More than 300 raw ideas came up in a couple of ideation sessions.

Three separate teams studies these raw ideas and developed them into high level solution directions using 3 different idea clustering approaches. The teams looked at the ideas in their own ways and articulated the solutions in their own words. 17 strong solution directions emerged - a consolidated blueprint for change, value and growth. A key aspect of this approach is that not a single idea is dropped or wasted!

However, 17 solution directions were too many to take forward. Some prioritization and selection was esential. The teams first played the solutions in the 4 global scenarios defined earlier. After all, ideas have to play out int he future and bringing in evaluation criteria from present business objectives too soon can kill the best ideas very quickly. 7 top solutions emerged.

Even 7 were too many to fund. We now used the Analytic Hierarchy Process to evaluate and prioritize the solutions along 3 criteria - Value, Urgency and Readiness. 2 out of the 7 solutions were deferred. The remaining 5 were taken forward as strategic initiatives with immediate 3 month roadmaps created and progress reviews thereafter.