Welcome back to the Be A Kitchen Innovator blog series on The Knickerbocker Glory! This is the third post in the series that will discuss the creation of opportunity areas from which new ideas will be created. I hope you find it useful.
Creating Themes and Opportunity Areas
In the first and second posts of this series we talked about…
- Writing our statement of purpose and giving it a twist making sure that we were being clear about what we want to accomplish.
- The importance of finding new facts to inspire us.
Both of these steps are critical to getting our innovation efforts off to a good start. The next step, creating themes and finding opportunity areas, is sort of like mis en place for our innovation inspiration. In the kitchen, a chef uses mis en place to organise his ingredients and station to prepare for cooking. In innovation, we use mis en place to organise our facts to prepare for ideation. In this post we will explore the importance of how we organise our facts before we set out to create a great set of new ideas.
From Knickerbocker Glory: A Chef’s Guide to Innovation in the Kitchen and Beyond!
Mis en Place For Innovation – Organising Facts
Sure, we could innovate based on individual facts, i.e. create one new idea based on one fact or piece of inspiration – consumers like blue so make it blue. But, when it comes to innovation it helps to think more broadly and bring together many bits of stimuli and inspiration. By first creating themes that are supported by our new inspiration we help ensure that a greater number of ideas will be created. And, more importantly, it helps inspire more bigger ideas.
As stated above, consider formulating themes to be like mis en place for information where all the facts are organized together into various themes or opportunity areas. Facts can be mixed and matched together like ingredients in a recipe to create a variety of themes. This is the foundation from which new ideas are created.
Remember the facts from Canada we discussed in the last post? Here they are again. These are the stimuli that will help us create new ideas (next post in the series).
Inspiration: Facts about Canada
|
Canada holds the record for the most gold medals ever won at the Winter Olympics. |
Canada inspired the naming of Winnie the Pooh |
Montreal |
The Blackberry Smartphone was developed in Ontario |
|
80% of all |
77% of the |
Macaroni |
Canada has |
|
Basketball |
Canada is |
The coffee |
Sweet |
|
Ice Hockey |
Nanaimo Bars are a legendary |
French is |
May West |
Creating Themes
Now we will take these facts and sort them into themes. Often, it is easier to group similar facts together first and then create the theme name or opportunity area.
Be creative when creating your themes. Having good themes, well supported by facts, will help with ideation and the creation of strong ideas that fit the statement of purpose. Here are some examples.
|
Canadian Love of Sport |
The Best Things From/In Canada |
Canadian Desserts |
|
Canada holds the record for the most gold medals ever won at the Winter Olympics |
Canada inspired the naming of Winnie the Pooh |
Nanaimo Bars are a legendary |
|
Basketball |
77% of the |
May West |
|
Ice Hockey |
Canada is |
|
|
|
Sweet |
|
|
|
Macaroni |
|
|
|
The coffee |
|
These themes might be straight forward, but we could also mix and match facts to create other themes. Sometimes it is worth being a little daring. Try and organise facts into one or two themes that are a bit different or unexpected.
Here is a another theme example.
|
Things Canadians Love |
|
Canada holds the record for the most gold medals ever won at the Winter Olympics |
|
Ice Hockey |
|
Sweet |
|
Nanaimo Bars are a legendary |
|
Macaroni |
|
The coffee |
|
80% of all |
With our themes created, we are now ready for ideation. The themes will be used to create ideas for new Knickerbocker Glory desserts that pay homage to Canada. By using themes the ideas we create in the next step of the process will reflect our inspiration and help us be true to our statement of purpose. The themes will also help unsure that a broad range of ideas will be created instead of just ideas based on one single fact.
Next time we will discuss how to create new ideas using these themes.
Have any questions so far? Have you ever participated in a process like this one? Have you ever created new ideas using themes? Let us know in the comment section!
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