Ever "brainstormed"? Did it work well? Well... Here are some new ideas on how to actually get innovative ideas for product development.

The authors of a new article in HBR titled "Breakthrough thinking from inside the box" are suggesting that a more structured, guided approach actually can yield better results than brainstorming or incremental improvement sessions.

The proposal includes a series of questions that can trigger the kind of lateral thinking required to come up with ideas that are both close to the core and innovative enough to be truly profitable. Here are some examples:

• What product can we take from our childhood and transform into a more extreme, expensive form for adults?
• Who spends at least 50% of what our product costs to adapt it to their specific needs?
• Who uses our product in ways we never expected or intended?
• What major breakthroughs in efficiency or effectiveness have we made in our business that could be applied in another industry?
• What is the biggest hassle of purchasing or using our product?
• Which technologies embedded in our product have changed the most since the product was last redesigned? 

It looks to me, that these questions can actually help the ideation process in several ways:

1. No dithering around: clear targets for analysis help focus the troops.
2. Self-Selection: participants can chose which questions they want to pursue, thus increasing involvement and focus
3. Parallel processing: several teams can take on several questions independently from each other
4. Idea smashing: several teams answer the same question, their results are then shared or swapped and smashed together with the ideas of the other team
5. Preparation: questions can be given to participants in advance to allow for data mining / digging before the ideation session, leading to more grounded / realistic ideas (can be "sprinkled in" to form a "pie-in-the-sky and a "down-to-data" group.

The article can be found at http://blogs.bnet.com/harvard/?p=141.