Parallels
Drawing from existing experiences in the world can act as a new lens for viewing your own.
Overview
One of the best places to find ideas is through inspiration borrowed from existing experiences. If you're struggling to find inspiration, try looking at other industries or products and identifying parallels with your own work. This can surface new ideas and approaches you may not have considered.
When identifying parallels, look beyond surface similarities and consider deeper underlying principles. Designing a new social app? Look at successful dating apps like Tinder or Bumble and identify the principles that make them work, like swiping and matching algorithms.
When working with clients, this is one of our favorite go-to methods for consistently generating great new ideas. Mixing and matching the best aspects of parallel products and industries is a mad-lib method for generating amazing opportunities.
A note of caution: you'll have some ridiculous stuff come out of this exercise. Don't discount the first set of combinations — some of these lead to incredible new feature or experience ideas.
Working with Constraints
Using sets is a mental strategy we all develop over our lives. It helps us categorize and organize information to make decisions. Sets are tied to ways we've solved problems before, and we return to them when new ones arise. They're often seen negatively, as something that leads to fixed thinking.
But we can use these sets to our advantage. By breaking a problem into sets and looking at how they overlap, we can identify new opportunities for innovation, and increase the number of categories we consider.
In the Parallels exercise, adding more categories to our lists results in even more diverse and unexpected combinations — leading to even more unique ideas.