How to prepare an ideation workshop
An ideation workshop needs a good preparation to be successful. Just to reassure you, or maybe scare you:
When I prepare a 1 day workshop, I have usually 2 days of work to prepare the workshop
So preparation is really a key part of the workshop preparation.
Specific elements to prepare for an ideation workshop
There are a few elements that need special attention when you prepare an ideation workshop:
- Participants: you want diversity (age, gender, culture, job titles, context, etc)
- Research summary: you need a good summary of the learnings you did in the research phase so that people can generate problems that will actually fix the problem. If you haven't do any research, now is the last moment.
- Inspiration: you'll need creative prompts, ideation technics and inspiring elements to help people get started. For the ideation technics you can use the ones we saw together in a previous chapter.
- Space and context: you need a space that puts people already in a positive, relaxed mindset. Trying to generate new ideas in an old depressing place will be harder.
- What happens next: you need to be clear what will happen with the ideas. Will you sort them during the workshop or after? What happens with the good ideas? Did you already plan how to test them? If not, now is really the last moment to start to think about it.
A few tools to help you out
These are really the specific elements to an ideation workshop. Outside of that, an ideation workshop is like any other workshop. So I gathered for you a few resources on workshop creation that could help you out. These are all free resources that I created based on my own practice.