Step 3. Search Internally
• Use personal and team knowledge and creativity to generate solution concepts
• Most open-ended creative activity
• Process of retrieving potentially useful piece of information from one's memory and adapting that information to the problem at hand
• Four guidelines for improving individual and group internal search:
o Suspend judgment
o Generate a lot of ideas
o Welcome ideas that may seem infeasible
o Use graphical and physical media - sketch!
• Both individual and group sessions can be useful
o Some concept generation should be done alone
o Then as a group, build consensus, communication information and refine concepts
• Hints for generating solution concepts:
o Make analogies: what other devices exist that solve a related problem?
o Wish and wonder: stimulate team members to consider new possiblities
o Use related stimuli
o Use unrelated stimuli
o Set quantitative goals: target the number of concepts
o Use the gallery method: display a large number of concepts simultaneously for discussion