The example that I'm going to use in this is an example I frequently use with my
class where we had brainstormed kind of social footwear.
The idea of putting technology in shoes or on shoes and
seeing how that could improve people's lives.
So it's kind of a silly idea, but it really usually leads to a wide
variety of interesting ideas and that's why I use it.
And when I kind of go through this process cull and combine clustering
I'm really kind of aiming for something like seven clusters maybe.
Definitely no more than ten I think it's hard to really articulate more
ideas than that.
And probably not less than three because that's not enough ideas for
a rich discussion.
So somewhere between three and
ten maybe and seven is frequently the number we end up with.
So as we go through your idea selection, how do you cull and combine.
The first thing is that since you weren't at all judging during your brainstorming
process, or at least you weren't supposed to judge during the ideation process,
you may actually have two ideas that are essentially identical.
So for example, in the class when we did the shoe brainstorming
the idea of a screen being on a shoe, the idea of being able to
project information on the shoe is really kind of identical.
I mean, there may be kind of different assumptions of technology, but
what it does is the same.
Somehow, information appears on your shoe.
So in fact, those two ideas, you can just pick one of those and keep that one and
discard the other.
You can remove all ideas that are unrelated to the project topic.
So for example again, because we weren't in the process of brainstorming people
may have come up with some creative ideas for
shoes that had nothing to with this idea of social or technology may
just have been like cool shoes with heels that look like the starship enterprise.
Well that's cool but it doesn't have anything to do with technology and
it doesn't have anything to do with social.
And so all those ideas can be removed from the list and
don't have to be included in the consideration.
So just going through those two steps,
frequently your list can be cut down by half.
So when you started out with your 500 ideas or
your 100 ideas, at this point you might only have 50 left or 250 left.