50 Ideas for a Toy

Creative Leadership & Problem Solving | Online Exercise # 6

Introduction

This week we’ll practice creative problem solving strategies to facilitate ideational thinking within the context of production innovation. These strategies are more fulsomely introduced and practiced in Principles of Creative Problem and Group Dynamics, but this week will give you a sneak peek that can guide further exploration or a review of tried-and-true strategies.

From this week’s reading, you’ll apply the
Ground Rules for Divergent Thinking, Brainstorming, and Forced Connections to generate 50 ideas for a novel toy. In the next online exercise, you’ll practice some strategies to communicate your idea for a novel toy to the rest of the class.

Product Innovation

Before introducing the process, it is helpful to clarify what constitutes product innovation. A product is a physical object such as an automobile, paintbrush, or mobile phone.

Evaluation

This online exercise is worth 5% of your final grade.

For this submission, the online exercise will primarily be evaluated via degree of completion by answering ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the following statements:

1. A minimum of 25 ideas for a novel toy were created using Brainstorming.

2. A minimum of 25 additional ideas for novel toys were created using Forced Connections.

3. A list of the top five ideas was created.

Process

Use the template provided below to record your process work. You’ll be uploading this document to the 50 Ideas dropbox folder and your classmates will not have access to the ideas. During the next online exercise, you’ll further develop the top idea and communicate it to your classmate. So, we’ll saving the big surprise for then.

You are more than welcome to collaborate with friends and family will completing this online exercise. But each student is expected to make an original submission.

Brainstorming

1. Review the Ground Rules for Divergent Thinking (see page 176 in Puccio et al.).

2. Apply Brainstorming (see pages 177-81 for instructions) to generate and record a minimum of 25 ideas in the table below.

Forced Connections

1. Review the Ground Rules for Divergent Thinking (see page 176 in Puccio et al.).

2. Apply Forced Connections (see pages 182-183 for instructions) to generate and record a minimum of 25 additional ideas in the tables below.

3. If you want to use more than three objects, please copy and paste the provided table.

Top Ideas

Review your process work and rank the top five ideas.

1.

2.

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5.