Cultural literacy

Design ideation is not just about the ability of individuals to come up with great ideas. It's also about how an individual's idea connects to other people's ideas. In a global context, where innovation is at a premium, ideation, then, becomes an issue of social connectivity across borders, or and expression of cultural literacy, that is, a mindful openness to other cultures. Such openness, in turn, becomes instrumental in the creation of high-value goods and services for international markets.

Ideas and entrepreneurship

The entrepreneur Richard Branson's top tips for success include: * I think lots of people have lots of great ideas, but very few people actually go out and try to put them into practice. * The first thing to do if you want to become an entrepreneur is basically to have an idea that is going to make a positive difference to other people's lives. A business is simply that. * You definitely need to believe in your idea. There's really no point in doing something in life unless people feel really good about it and proud about it. You've got to have passion for it and you've got to be able to inspire other people to have a passion for it too.* If an idea is a good idea you should be able to pitch it in two or three sentences and two or three sentences fit very neatly on the back of an envelope. Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-26575792

Connecting

A strong feature of ideation is that it is dynamic. It is in fact the dynamic use of the human brain, which is intensely interactive, that things suddenly become clear, the ubiquitous "Aha!" moment. What happens, then, is that we see new connections between events, ideas, and circumstances that we hadn't noticed before. That is, seeing how things connect rather than only seeing how they might be different.

Robust ideation

Although inspiration and imagination play essential parts in generating and forming ideas, bringing a sense of organisation and structure to ideas makes for a more robust ideation process. Moreover, at the presentation stage, ideas may need to be edited or fined tuned. But this does not necessarily mean that any elements that have been edited out cannot be inserted back later or put into another creative project. Skilful use and management of creative resources pave the way for effective communication of ideas towards their realisation.

Ideation strategy

After the Aha-moment it may seem urgent to realise one's idea. Yet to hesitate to act on the idea is not always a bad thing or a sign of weakness. Indeed many times, holding off on making a decision or coming to a conclusion is the best possible thing to happen, and can even be considered a good ideation strategy.

Personal ideography

Sometimes imagination works overtime, filling the mind with all sorts of vivid images and concepts. The trick is to know when to pay attention to these and when to dismiss them out of hand. To avoid overly hasty decision of what ideas to keep and what ideas to throw away, a good practice is to jot them all down and go over them at leisure at a later stage. Indeed keeping track systematically of ones' ideas, and recording them digitally for easy retrieval or sharing (social media), would over time build up a considerable personal ideography serving as a source for inspiration, collaboration or reference.

Hardwired gender based ideation?

Psychological testing has consistently indicated a significant difference between the sexes in the ability to perform various mental tasks, with men outperforming women in some tests and women outperforming men in others. Now there seems to be a physical explanation: A pioneering study, involving a special brain-scanning technique called diffusion tensor imaging, has shown for the first time that the brains of men and women are wired up differently which could explain some of the stereotypical differences in male and female behaviour. The researchers believe the physical differences between the two sexes in the way the brain is hardwired could play an important role in understanding why men are in general better at spatial tasks and motor skills, such as map reading, while women are better at verbal tasks and social cognition tests involving memory, empathy and intuition. But could there be significant difference between the sexes in the ability to ideate? Or, performing intuitive tasks, often considered at the heart of creative pursuits? And how would any such difference be tested and measured given that design ideas are propositional rather than fully formed or resolved solutions to problems posed? Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/the-hardwired-difference-between-male-and-female-brains-could-explain-why-men-are-better-at-map-reading-8978248.html