Step 3: Search Internally
Internal search is the use of personal and team knowledge and creativity to generat solution concepts. Often called brainstorming, this type of search is internal in that all of the ideas to emerge from this step are created from knowledge already in the posion of the tea m. This activity may be the most open-ended and creative of an tair
•product development. We find it useful to think of internal search as a proce of r<
• trieving a potentially useful piece of information from one's memory and then adap
•that information to the problem at hand. This process can be carried out by individuals working in isolation or by a group of people working together.Four guidelines are useful for improving both individual and group internal search:
1. Suspend judgment. In most aspects of daily life, success depends on an ability to quickly evaluate a set of alternatives and take action. For example, none of us would be very productive if deciding what to wear in the morning or what to eat for breakfast in volved an extensive period of generating alternatives before making a judgment. Because most decisions in our day-to-day lives have implications of only a few minutes or hours, we are accustomed to making decisions quickly and moving on. Concept generation for product development is fundamentally different. We have to live with the consequences of product concept decisions for years. As a result, suspending evaluation for the days or weeks required to generate a large set of alternatives is critical to success. The imperative to suspend judgment is frequently translated into the rule that during group concept generation sessions no criticism of concepts is allowed. A better approach is for individuals perceiving weaknesses in concepts to channel any judgmental tendencies into suggestions for improvements or alternative concepts.
2. Generate a lot of ideas. Most experts believe that the more ideas a team generates, the more likely the team is to explore fully the solution space. Striving for quantity lowers the expectations of quality for any particular idea and therefore may encourage people to share ideas they may otherwise view as not worth mentioning. Further, each idea acts as a stimulus for other ideas, so a large number of ideas has the potential to stimulate even more ideas.
3. Welcome ideas that may seem infeasible. Ideas which initially appear infeasible can often be improved, "debugged," or "repaired" by other members of the team. The more infeasible an idea, the more it stretches the boundaries of the solution space and encourages the team to think of the limits of possibility. Therefore, infeasible ideas are quite valuable and their expression should be encouraged.
4. Use graphical and physical media. Reasoning about physical and geometric information with words is difficult. Text and verbal language are inherently inefficient vehicles for describing physical entities. Whether working as a group or as an individual , abundant sketching surfaces should be available. Foam, clay, cardboard, and other three dimensional media may also be appropriate aids for problems requiring a deep under standing of form and spatial relationships.