Ideation Workshops

These are workshops where people get together and do lateral thinking. Unlike the brainstorming sessions where most people are just physically present, these ideation workshops are very effective in generating new and creative ideas. Attendees are encouraged to navigate away from the traditional and accustomed practices and explore new and out of the box ideas. 

These workshops can be regarded as very advanced brainstorming sessions where everyone has an input. In order to increase participation of the creative minds, there are group exercises which actually work effectively.

Creativity is of course a great property to have in the people attending these ideation workshops but it should not be seen as a must. Not everyone has to be creative. Ideation and creative thinking are learnable and everyone with the will to generate better products should experience.

1. Ideation workshops will shift your point of view to your users’ point of view. You will see things from their eyes thus, you will better understand what they expect from your product. It will make you question things, do broader thinking before taking any decisions
2. Ideation workshops will help you to think outside the box and actually be on the more creative side, delivering innovative solutions
3. Ideation workshops will help you get the best ideas and views of the team members
4. Ideation workshops will help you visualize things that you would have never thought of.
5. Ideation workshops will help you increase the alternatives (options) to your solutions
6. Ideation workshops will help everyone else in your team to learn all the other stuff that is going through your mind, and maybe they can build on top of those ideas

Ideation is one of the initial phases of development, which is probably the most exciting and most creative one of all. Ideation, as the name would suggest is the phase where creative ideas are generated. Any company which deals with marketing campaigns, strategies or product development will need an effective ideation workshop to be carried out, either by their internal team or an external source such as Saypr. 

These workshops are a bit different than traditional brainstorming sessions which can sometimes turn into people physically being there but with an inactive or inefficient brain use. What we do in such ideation workshops is to challenge people with tasks that will bring the best of them and make them consider things in a very different way and think outside the box. This way, there is a higher chance for creative ideas that might have a chance in the real world to emerge. 

Due to their size and limited budgets, small to medium size companies have limited resources and these resources might not be the best ones to do the job. They might lack the creativity or the valuable experience that is critical for smaller companies who try to get the most of the people that they employ. You can not blame smaller companies for having higher demands from their employees. But when it comes to creativity and the ability to be able to deliver bright ideas, it is not everyones’ field. An external set of eye might see things better and at a wider angle than those that are dug deep inside of the project. So, getting help from companies like Saypr will definitely help smaller companies with limited resources to deliver much bigger and more promising products.

Larger companies have the money and resources, but sometimes, the management might feel the need of outsourcing such services or adding external sources that might help generate much brighter ideas that can lead to a bigger innovation. Or in some cases, when the topic of interest is out of the scope of the internal teams, then the management might opt for outer sources for help in generating creative ideas. 

At Saypr, we were brought in by a couple of large companies at the ideation phase, where their internal teams got stuck and they were continually iterating around the same two ideas. They lacked the creativity that the supervisors of the project were looking for so they called us in. After investigating what they were doing and what the targets were, we made our own list of priorities and pain points, and went to approach these from a much different angle. This helped us uncover new insights, and this unusual approach was liked by the supervisors. Then we joined forces with their internal teams and evolved around the approach that we took in the first place. In the end, the idea got bigger and bigger that some features of the product they originally intended to launch got massive changes due to our contributions on maturing their idea.

The cost of ideation services shows difference. The level and depth of the processes, the involvement required, the decision taking mechanisms’ reactions guide the pricing of such an ideation workshop. It is hard and nearly impossible to give out a random price to anyone. What the industry does in pricing such a service is to estimate the amount of resources that will be required to carry out such an ideation phase, and the level of involvement that will be required. For small projects, these prices are very small, but for larger projects with a bigger involvement of the client side, the ideation phases can be longer, thus requires more time and effort.