Ideation: First Step Towards Innovation

Here are the slides I prepared for a brownbag¹ talk I was invited to give at Lufthansa’s marketing department. (Some slides have been modified for copyright and/or confidentiality reason.) Bear in mind that slides alone are not at all self-sufficient, they are meant to support the talk. The targeted audience was rather broad, spanning from data scientists and business analysts, to senior executives.

Description

A definition of innovation is presented with a following discussion on why it matters. Then, the focus is set on the first stage of innovation, that is ideation. One can distinguish three pillars to enable a creative culture: people, organization and processes. Each of them is succinctly introduced. The last part of the talk contained some remarks that might be perceived as a bit tendentious. For example, the currently very fashionable “design thinking workshops” are questioned—not the concept of design thinking itself, but how too often it is implemented through sporadic off-site workshops without a well-honed problem statement and without subsequent follow-up.

Keywords

Ideation, Innovation, Creativity, Brainstorming, Design Thinking