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Food innovation idea generation

November 10, 2010 by Darrel Suderman — President, Food Technical Consulting

How do you include “Ideation” within the Food Innovation Process? Innovative ideas can have many sources. According to The Innovator’s Toolkit (Harvard Business Press), some ideas originate in a flash, while others areaccidental. But as Peter Drucker told readers of Harvard Business Review almost two decades ago, most ideas result from a conscious, purposeful search for opportunities to solve problems or please customers. Ideas are essential building blocks from which innovation and innovative technologies and products are made. The challenge is to apply idea generating skills to the food and beverage industries within a structured product commercialization process that yields a constant stream of new product innovations!

According to The Innovator’s Toolit, there are four idea-generating techniques: 1. Brainstorming (which includes visioning and experimenting), 2. Nominal Group Technique 3. TRIZ and 4. Catchball. Most food developers, culinary chefs, marketing managers, and food executives are familiar with brainstorming techniques which are fundamental to most ideation processes. Even The Food Innovation Institute uses brainstorming in its strategic ideation sessions called Strategate. But for the most part, effective brainstorming is guided by five key principles:

1. Focus: A brainstorming session should concentrate on a particular problem or opportunity, and be bounded by real world constraints. For example, one of the leading challenges for QSR restaurants has been the development of portable packaging for food products for customers riding in their cars.
2. Suspended Judgment: All judging should be suspended while ideas are being generated. Even the wildest ideas should be encouraged. It may take 500 sandwich ideas to identify that one sandwich innovation product that becomes a $100 million annual business category.
3. Personal Safety: Participants should be assured that unpopular ideas or ideas that threaten the status quo will not provoke recriminations. This weak link in a chain often surfaces during food Focus Groups.
4. Serial Discussion: Limit the discussion to one conversation at a time, and keep it focused on the topic at hand.
5. Build on Ideas: Try to build on the ideas of others whenever possible – again, this is a common technique in most food ideation sessions.

The second idea generating techniques is called Nominal Group Technique (NGT). Since brainstorming is dependent on people speaking up, the process falls short when they do not share their ideas. A remedy for this problem is nominal group technique which encourages ideation participants to write down their ideas rather than verbalize them. Once the recorder has collected all the ideas in written form, the facilitator reads them to the entire group. This technique limits dominate people and achieves participation from everyone.

Since brainstorming and NGT share the common weakness of randomness, some ideation processes use TRIZ or Theory of Inventive Problem Solving. This methodology systematically solves problems and creates innovation by identifying and eliminating what its originator (Russian scientist Genrich Altshuller) called technical contradictions. This method was used by Thomas Edison in the late 1800’s to overcome the obstacle of the metal filament burning out in a light bulb.

Among other management techniques provided by the Japanese, they have also given us Catchball. Catchball is a cross-functional method for accomplishing two goals: idea enrichment/improvement, and buy-in among participants. Once you have generated an idea, you can build and improve on it. Catchball works by an initial idea that is “tossed” to collaborators for consideration. The idea may be a new strategic goal, a new product, or a way to improve some work process. Whoever “catches” the idea is responsible for understanding it or improving it in some way. And the improved idea is continually bounced around the ideation group. So try using this technique when new energy needs to be applied to your ideation sessions!

To sum things up, it is a good idea to try other nonconventional ideation techniques to bring new energy to the new product development process.

As we will discuss in future food innovation blogs, most current food ideation process focus on randomness without structure. But we will discover that the ‘ideation experts’ discussed in The Innovator’s Toolkit repeatedly recommend a semi-structured environment. That’s why The Food Innovation Institute focuses on the concept of Strategate Ideation – which fits unlimited ideation into corporate strategies to insure a higher product commercialization success rate.

About Darrel Suderman

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