Attribute Listing, Morphological Analysis and Matrix Analysis are good techniques for finding new combinations of products or services. They are sufficiently similar to be discussed together. We use Attribute Listing and Morphological Analysis to generate new products and services.
SCAMPER is based on the notion that everything new is a modification of something that already exists. Each letter in the acronym represents a different way you can play with the characteristics of what is challenging you to trigger new ideas:
The stimulus comes from forcing yourself to answer questions which you would not normally pose
This tool helps you generate ideas for new products and services by encouraging you to think about how you could improve existing ones.
After you've acquired a stimulus from a specific technique you need to absorb it and turn it into a useful idea. This page is dedicated to giving you a set of proven methods for modifying the original stimulus into a useful idea.
By getting a random word as a prompt and forcing yourself to use it to solve your problem you are practically guaranteed to attack the problem from a different direction to normal. You take a word from a random word generator, extract its underlying principles and then apply them to your problem to see how they can help.
Brainstorming is one of the key tools used to generate ideas and solutions. In this course, students will learn about six types of brainstorming techniques: Imaginary Brainstorming, HIT Matrix, Concept Tree, SCAMPER, Brainwriting 6-3-5 and Random Stimulus.
A random stimulus is any of a class of creativity techniques that explore randomization. Most of their names start with word "random"; random word, random heuristic, random picture, random sound, etc. In each random creativity technique the user is presented with a random stimulus and explores associations that has a potential to bring novel ideas. The power of random stimulus is that it can lead you to explore some useful associations that could never be explored intentionally.
Several authors have recommended the use of random stimuli of various kinds (see Creative Thinking, Lateral Thinking, Problem-Solving through Creative Analysis), which suggests there is a fundamental significance for being open to possibilities from everywhere.