Tools & Techniques for Ideation

Introduction to Ideation
Before briefly describing creative thinking tools or techniques, there are three points which need attention.

One: the old adage that two know more than one is most certainly true for creative thinking.
It is no coincidence that the advertising industry introduced the concept of so-called Creative Teams (Art Director and Copywriter) in the early 1960’s, that tools for collaborative systematic inventive thinking or group work are – after ideation – by far the largest group of related tools, nor that the most universally used and well-know model for collective ideation – Brainstorming – was created by an advertising man, BBDO co-founder Alex Osborn.

Two: Listing is extremely useful in virtually any structured, systematic thinking and/or Ideation effort. Listing synonyms, antonyms, advantages, disadvantages, alternatives, assumptions, bugs, categories, limitations, opposites, parts, relations, rules, suppositions and so forth, is practically always a good starting point for personal and collective thinking processes.
Listing is an integral part of many of the systematic creative processes or methods described here, because – as established earlier – quantity is, especially at the initial stages of the creative process, more important than quality.
Fluency – the ability to generate large amounts of ideas or alternative solutions for a problem – is also an integral part of virtually all creativity tests, for starters the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT).
In my experience Listing is the simplest, most practical and most productive precursor for creative thinking, even with totally untrained subjects or individuals with exceptionally well developed creativity inhibitors. After all: almost anybody can make a shopping list.

Methods and Tools for the Creative Production Process

The following is a series of methodologies to structure the problem solving or creative process.
I describe them here briefly with the purpose of indexing the methods I have found.
If you want to know more about a particular one, I'd suggest you Google the term, since the majority of them were found on the Web during my research.

15 Sparks
A method originally used for internal staff training by the advertising agency McCann Erickson, but by now extensively tried by myself and others in academic practice throughout Latin America.
Although oriented at, and illustrated with, examples from advertising and marketing, it has also proven useful in classes and seminars on branding, innovation, strategic thinking, and so forth.
As the name suggests, it consists of 15 statements directed at changing the mind-set: Instead of asking who we are talking to, ask who we are NOT talking to, Turn your biggest threats into opportunities, Co-create with your consumers, How can your brand, product or service become a tangible part of culture? and If you product were a service, what would it be?, among others.