Challenging the Myth of Ideation in Innovation

Key Insight

For decades, 'ideation' has dominated innovation thinking, with 'to innovate' often equated to 'to find ideas,' as evidenced by the widespread adoption of brainstorming techniques. Brainstorming rules, such as 'encourage wild ideas' and 'defer judgment,' underscore this focus. This cultural emphasis, reflected in a steep increase in the word 'ideation' in books after World War II, rests on two core assumptions: that finding a good idea is the most challenging aspect of innovation, and that generating more ideas increases the likelihood of finding a superior one.

However, this myth is now 'teetering.' Its own success, coupled with the impressive increase in people's creative capabilities, has resulted in a world 'awash with ideas,' rendering the first assumption obsolete. The true difficulty is no longer generating ideas but making sense of the abundant opportunities to discover a compelling vision or meaning. Consequently, the second assumption also falters: while numerous ideas are beneficial for solution-seeking (where a clear evaluation scale exists), they are not for meaning innovation.

In the context of meaning innovation, the objective is not to defer judgment but to actively 'create the scale' of judgment itself—a novel framework for understanding and evaluating. Judgment is an integral and simultaneous part of the creation process for new meanings. This approach sharply contrasts with conventional problem-solving, which prioritizes extensive idea generation before evaluating against predefined criteria, emphasizing critical reflection and interpretation as the core drivers rather than mere ideation.