The "WOW" finder

Why?

Not all ideas are equally innovative or feasible. The ‘WOW’ Finder is an effective tool for making a quick sorting of ideas after the divergent phase, in order to identify the ones that have a high level of innovative potential. Thus, by focusing on real innovation, the students avoid falling into old patterns.

How?

The students draw the template by Byttebier and Ramon (2007) on a blackboard or large poster (see illustration). Next, the students write down all their ideas on red, blue and yellow post-it notes and place these into the model. This implies a classification of ideas according to their degree of innovativeness (i.e. is the idea old or new?), and their feasibility (i.e. is the idea easy or difficult to implement?). Red ideas are both feasible and easy to implement, and thus especially interesting for the students to work with. The blue ideas do not have high innovation potential, but represent easy pickings as they are very feasible. Lastly, the yellow ideas are not feasible at the present time, but might represent the future and tomorrow’s red ideas.

Tips

The method can be combined with Resource Bank or Brain Image in order to determine whether the students have the necessary resources to implemet their ideas.

Literature

Byttebier, I. and Ramon, V. (2007), Creativity Today, Amsterdam: BIS Publisher.