The top 5 lessons I learned throughout the Ideation process are as follows:
- Humor, thanks to the pink sticky notes, helped me brainstorm. Prior to the pink stickies, I considered myself fresh out of ideas. However, after sharing a few laughs, I was surprised that I was able to throw several more yellow post-its up.
- Some of our terrible ideas (pink sticky notes) were edited into ideas with great potential. I purposefully chose ideas that I expected my company would never do, so I was pleasantly surprised when my group was able to swing a bad idea into a good one.
- Sometimes, collaboration takes patience. Most of our team meetings over the semester thus have been riddled with debate. It’s taken us a while to get to know each other and how to best work as a team. Our ideation experience was one of the first times we excelled together without tension.
- Brainstorming individually before collaborating on the board helped us see where our best opportunities to excel were. Seeing where my teammates and I differed and overlapped between ideas gave me a good idea of what we would end up deciding our HMW statements would be based upon.
- The final thing I gathered from the ideation process was that my team has a great grasp on where we’re taking our project. Before ideation, we were a type of limbo where our company and products lines (Hershey’s Chocolates) were so dense that we couldn’t decide the best thing for them to do. However, the Ideation process calmed my nerves and I’m confident that we’ve made the right decisions.