Advanced Brainstorm Methods - SCAMPER and Random Word

Hi, this is Paul Sloane again, and I want to take you through some advanced brainstorming techniques in this very short session if I can. And I want to show you 2 very powerful techniques which will generate a great number of creative ideas for you. And the first one is particularly good when you're looking for new products or you want to take an existing product or service and innovate around it. So it's not quite so good if you're looking at processes or topics like, you know, how can we reduce cost. But if you're looking at product innovation or service innovation or process innovation, then this one is worth looking at. And it's called SCAMPER. And in SCAMPER, what you do is you apply 7 verbs, and you apply them very aggressively to your particular product or service. So you've got an existing product or service, and then you say, what could we substitute is the first letter in SCAMPER. The S is substitute. What can we substitute for any component of the product or the service or for the whole product or service? And you generate as many ideas as you can just starting with that starting point, substitute. Then the second verb you apply is combine. You ask the question, what could we combine with our product or service? What could we add to it to make it different or better? And you come up with all sorts of crazy ideas, things you can add, ridiculous things, outrageous things. Stupid things, and then sooner or later there's a chance you'll come up with a really creative and useful thing you can add. The third verb that you apply is adapt. And here you're saying, what can we adapt from outside and use in our product? What thing could we adopt, if you prefer, from outside and incorporate into our product in how it's delivered or how it's used? The third— the fourth verb that you use, magnify or minimise, or you can say maximise or minimise actually. You ask the question, what could we do with our product or service to make it enormously large or extraordinarily small? Or what aspect of this product or service could we deliver in a very, very large package or a tiny package? And you just go to extremes with that and see where it leads you. The next verb that you try is put to other use. And here you say, what other use could we possibly put our product to? How could we use it for something else entirely? And you range over those possibilities. When you've really tried that, the next one you move on to is eliminate. You ask the question, what could we eliminate entirely from this product or service? What would happen if we took this out? What would happen if we took this particular component out? And you explore all of those possibilities in a very open and creative way. And then the final verb is rearrange or reverse. And in particular, you think here about how the product is used and the sequence of actions in which it is used. And you say, could we rearrange or reverse those actions in any way? Could we do what's normally done last, could we do it first? And you just ask those questions and you explore that possibility. So it takes a while to go through these 7. Not all of them work with every product. But typically 1 or 2 of them will work really well for you and will generate quite significant innovations, either incremental innovations, which are improvements to a product or service, or quite radical innovations. So just to reinforce those verbs and how they work, let me give you some examples. The examples I show in my workshop for each of these. And for substitute, the example I give is spectacles. And if you were making spectacles in the 1950s and you'd done this, then you could say, what could we substitute for any aspect of the spectacles? You might say, well, we could have a plastic lens instead of a glass lens, or we could have a scratch-proof lens instead of a glass lens, or we could have a plastic frame instead of a metal frame, or we could have a very soft bridge instead of the hard bridge that we've got on the nose. Or what could we substitute for spectacles entirely? Then obviously things such as contact lenses or laser eye surgery are substitutions for the whole service, the whole value added. It could be provided in a substituted way by using, for example, laser eye surgery instead of spectacles. So that's an example of how substitute Combined, there are many, many examples. An obvious one, if you look at your mobile phone now, it's combined with a camera. It's combined with an MP3 player. It might be combined with your messaging. It might be combined with a satellite navigation system. There's all sorts of things which are added in. And that applies to all sorts of other products. What 2 things could we put together to make something new? What can we add to our product? Another example I give is a suitcase. And if you add wheels to the suitcase, you get A suitcase with wheels, which is a commonplace thing now, but it wasn't 20 years ago. It was an innovation that some luggage company came up with, which at the time was quite radical to put wheels on a suitcase. Adapt is one of the most difficult ones to use, but when it's used properly, it's one of the most powerful. The question is, what idea can we adapt from outside and use in our product or service? And the story I give here is of a a manager working in a deodorant company who was looking for a new way to apply a deodorant. And he looked on his desk and there was a ballpoint pen and he said, that's an interesting way of applying a liquid. And he copied the ball in the ballpoint pen to create the roll-on deodorant. And the ball in the roll-on deodorant is based on the ball in the ballpoint pen. And that's an example of how somebody has adapted an idea from an external environment and incorporated it into their product. And the task in SCAMPER is to try and do something similar for your product or service. Maximise, minimise, there are many examples of this. And one I would say obviously is a restaurant which says all you can eat for $15 or whatever. That has maximised its proposition in a sense. Unilever in India sell shampoos in tiny sachets that are one-use. Shampoos because people can't afford to buy a bottle of shampoo. They'll buy a single sachet very cheaply. So the question is, to what extent could you maximise or magnify your proposition to an enormous size, or minimise it to a very small proposition? Put to other use is where you say, what entirely different application could I find for my product or service? And the story I like to give here is of De Beers. And De Beers in South Africa was a mining company that mined diamonds and sold them for industrial purposes. They were used in drill bits because a diamond is the hardest substance known to man. But they had a lot of small diamonds left over that they didn't know what to do with, that they weren't really much use for a drill bit. And they said, what other use can we put these diamonds to? And they invented the concept of the engagement ring as a way of disposing of their surplus diamonds, which is quite a remarkable story since it became a huge market in its own right. But it was originally a way of putting industrial diamonds to a different use. Eliminate asks the question, what could we eliminate entirely from our product or service? In just the same way that Amazon has eliminated the middleman and gone straight to direct selling, eliminated the shop. And the masters of elimination, the example I would use is Ryanair. And Ryanair have eliminated all sorts of cost items. They've eliminated ticketing. They've eliminated travel agents. They don't use them. They've eliminated allocated seating. You just sit wherever you can. They've eliminated a free cup of tea or coffee on the flight. Some people would say they've eliminated customer service to some extent. They've certainly eliminated the lounge which other airlines offer. Any area of cost which upmarket airlines offer. Ryanair just said let's eliminate and let's go with a very basic service. And there's a big market for that. It doesn't please everyone but it does please a particular sector of the market which just wants to fly in the cheapest way possible. Rearrange reverse is looking at the service you offer and the example I give here is of a restaurant. And if you could think of a traditional restaurant you would go in, you would look at the menu, you would order the dishes you want, they would be brought to you, you'd order any drinks, and eventually you'd get the bill and then you'd pay. But if you look at a fast food restaurant like McDonald's, they've rearranged this service. So you go in, you look at a menu which is placed above you, and you then order and you pay before you get the food. So they've just rearranged the order in which things are done, and that makes for a more efficient workflow for them. So those are examples of SCAMPER and how it's used. And if you try it, spend a little bit of time on each verb. Don't dash from one to the other. Really work each verb as hard as you can, and you might get on any particular verb, you might get 15, 20 ideas. And then you evaluate which of those are really potentially good ideas, circle those, and then go on to the next verb. And as a result of that process, after you've been doing this for quite a while, half an hour or so, you might not have used all the verbs, but you will have generated a lot of good ideas. So that's SCAMPER. I also want to cover another method, which is the random word. And the random word is a very powerful method, but a lot of people don't understand it or believe in it until they've seen it used. And what you do with a random word, and this by the way works for any kind of brainstorming or creative thinking challenge, it doesn't just work for new products, it works for anything. You write down the challenge on the top of the piece of paper, and then you find a noun at random from the dictionary. You don't select it, it's the first one that you come to. And you write down the noun at the top of the page, and then you write down some attributes of the noun. This is very important, some associations which might be literal, they might be lateral, they might be words from the dictionary, they might be associations that come from other walks of life, but you have to have Typically you have about 5 or 6 or 7 attributes, different attributes of the noun. And then you force an association between the word or its attributes and the objective. And amazingly it works. It generates a lot of ideas, many of which are silly, many of which are ridiculous, but occasionally you get a really creative idea from it. So let's take an example. Let's say that the word was oasis that we turned up, and the challenge we have is how to attract a lot more visitors to Bognor Regis. That's our challenge. We're working in the tourist office, and we use the random word and we get the word oasis. So what associations would we have for the word oasis, the noun? Well, we might put up desert. That's where you find it. It's a refreshment. I think there's a drink called oasis, but it's certainly a refreshment in the desert. A camel might stop at an oasis. It's a rock band led by Liam Gallagher. You reach an oasis when you go on a journey. And the main component you've got there is water. So we then write those down and then we try to force ideas based on this. So we say desert. What ideas could we have with the desert? Well, we could have a golf tournament with lots of bunkers. We could have a sand sculpture contest on the beach. Yeah. We could have a dessert competition where we build the largest cake or most wonderful desserts. We have a dessert festival. So you see here I'm stretching the point— oasis, desert, dessert— but that doesn't matter. All you're trying to do is give the brain a random starting point to come up with ideas, a different starting point from the routine one. A camel, what could we do? We could have camel rides along the beach. For children, just as a novelty, as a gimmick, as something to bring people in. It could be done. It wouldn't be too expensive. Rock band. Let's think of a rock festival. Let's have the— instead of the Isle of Wight Festival, let's have the Bognor Regis Festival. Let's get all the top indie bands and the up-and-coming bands. Let's get Liam Gallagher to open it. Let's get him to switch on the lights, or somebody like him. Who else could we get who's a pop star who lives near here who could come along? This is the way the brain works. It starts with this crazy idea or this crazy word, and then you force associations and you write them all down, including really stupid ones, and you see where it leads. And very often you will get really creative ideas from this, much more so than a vanilla brainstorm where you're just thinking in a void and trying to think of creative ideas with no starting point. It's easier for the brain to start with a different starting point and force an association, force a link. So you try one word and you get as many different ideas as you can, and then you might select the best. Then you go on to a different word. And I find that simple nouns work best— tree or corner or fish or scale or anything like that. Abstract nouns like hope or destiny don't work as well, though you can still try them. Or very complex nouns, but simple nouns seem to work pretty well. I've also done it with photos. I've done it with songs. I've done it with objects where you ask people to bring in a random object that they think no one else will bring in without telling them why. And somebody will bring in a bottle opener, and somebody will bring in a cork, or somebody will bring in something else. And then you say, right, now you've got to tell us why this object is the key to solving this problem. And other people have got to force associations between the object and the problem and come up with ideas based around the object or any attributes of the object. And it sometimes works. Some objects don't work well at all. Others work really well. You don't know until you try them. It's the same with the word. But when it works, it works really well. So those are 2 powerful methods that I would recommend for you. That's SCAMPER, which is particularly useful if you're looking for new products or services. And the random word, which is a very lateral technique, is introducing a stimulation, a random stimulation that just takes the brain to a different point. And I guarantee that if you use these 2 methods, you will generate a lot more ideas and a lot more creative ideas. And if you want my contact details, they're coming up now. We've got my website, destinationinnovation.com. And my email address. So good luck and great success with your brainstorming.