Fast Ideas – The Fast Ideative Process

If you are not pressed for time right now in developing Ideas, you can utilize the full Ideative Process.  The Ideative Process is about growing your Experience (E) and Knowledge (K) through Vivid (V) means, then utilizing that Experience and Knowledge to Assemble Ideas.  Because you are in a hurry, you are not going to grow your Es & Ks during The Fast Ideative Process.  Instead, you are only going to access and rejuvenate the vast  of your existing Es & Ks.

First, Understand How The Ideative Process Works:

The Ideative Process, (TIP) is analogous to a child playing with building blocks like Legos or Robotix. Children playing with blocks will bring a variety of types of blocks, other toys, and objects that are not toys, into their play. The fact that a Lego brick and a Robotix toy don’t interconnect is not only okay with a child but very good. Apples and pillows are not toys but those details don’t matter to children, in fact, they often help.

A fundamental of Ideative is that children combine related and seemingly unrelated items to play in ways that are truly innovative.

How to do The Ideative Process, now
Imagine a child combing the Lego’s and Robotix to build a space ship, using a cardboard box for the space station, paper clips for a rescue ladder, and an apple as the space monster. Sounds like fun! Ideative is based on a process of building Idea similar to the way a child builds for play.

The Fast Ideative Process centers on step 3 of TIP, Assemble Ideas in Your Mind’s Ideative Workshop, and do it Vividly.

The Ideative Process is a means to use your life Experiences and Knowledge as though they were components of children’s play from the above example. You assemble your E & K into potential ideas the way the child combines blocks and other things for play.  Take a few thoughts, and start to assemble those thoughts.

Begin with basic information.  If you are trying to develop Ideas for new smart phone applications, start with your Experiences using smart phone applications.  There are applications to help you shop, find friends, get to different locations, and play games.  Look at every application you can find, then with all of your Experience and Knowledge of existing aps, start pulling in some Related thoughts, other software applications, perhaps instant messaging, picture editing, web design.  Then stretch yourself by adding Universal ideas.  Is there something from the baseball game you attended last week?  Perhaps the fireworks show, the hotdog vendor, or the way the seat folded down?

What about your vacation to Puerto Rico a year ago?  Can you apply something you saw in the bricks of the fort in Old San Juan?  What about the colors of the fish you saw snorkeling.

All these items are blocks of E & K that you piece together to create ideas.

Is this idea good? If you like an Idea you have assembled, set it aside to keep (write it down) just as a child would set the new object to the side while building the next item.

Once you complete an Idea, ask yourself if you can build even better Ideas from the Idea you just created. The equivalent action for the child would be to look at the spaceship and decide to either build similar spaceships, turn this spaceship into an entire space station, or build other objects to work with this spaceship. You will consider whether or not you can take one good idea and build others off of it.

If you can build other Ideas off your first, build them now. Otherwise, set your first Idea aside and repeat this process.

If you don’t like the Idea you have just built pull the components apart and start all over again with a combination of some of the blocks you just used and other blocks, or perhaps, a completely new set of components.

That’s it. I wish I could find a way to make TIP more complex than that. In fact, to be Ideative is to be that child.

A note on the components, blocks and other things you will assemble:
Your ‘Blocks’ are made of items including (but not limited to):

If you’re trying to develop ideas for a business, pull in E & K from your business and some completely unrelated business. For example, if you run a group of hardware and home center stores, you will pull Es & Ks from something unrelated to your current job, such as your college job waiting tables. Or get further away from your work. Are there Es & Ks from the chair lift operations at a ski resort you’ve been to? How about the way people rush to get on the bus in many Central American cities? Es & Ks can come from Experiences and Knowledge of good things but also poorly run operations that you want to avoid. Maybe you have Es & Ks to build with from the traffic jam you were in this morning, or the process to remove road ice that led to the jam.

Experience and Knowledge enhanced by Vivid

Vivid =  the aggregate of the inputs from:
1. Your five senses, and;
2. All of the emotional inputs attached to that E & K.

While you are pressed for time in developing Ideas you are limited in your use of Vivid.  You are not growing your Es & Ks during The Fast Ideative Process, only accessing them.  However, your existing Es and Ks came to you with Vivid, even if you did not understand that at the time.  You can recall your Vivid by thinking of the related senses and emotions involved when you experienced the E or gained the K.

During that lecture, who sat next to you?  What was the lighting like in the lecture hall?  Was it hot or cold or comfortable?  Were you able to hear the speaker well?  Could you see the speaker and all the speakers visual materials?