SCAMPER technique: the 7 operations, with worked examples

The SCAMPER technique generates ideas by applying 7 operations to something that already exists: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, and Reverse. Work through all 7 and even a stale product yields 20 to 30 concrete variations.

SCAMPER, assembled by Bob Eberle from Alex Osborn's question lists, is the most mechanical of the classic brainstorming techniques, and that is its strength. You do not wait for inspiration; you run the checklist. It works best when you have an existing product, feature, process or offer to operate on. For a blank page, use open divergence first and bring SCAMPER in to multiply what you find.

The worked examples below apply every operation to one running case: a weekly paid newsletter about e-commerce trends whose growth has flattened at 4,000 subscribers.

The 7 SCAMPER operations, each with a worked example

S: Substitute

Swap a component for something else: the material, the channel, the audience, the format, the person doing the work. Ask "what can I replace, and with what?"

Newsletter example: substitute the essay format with a scored teardown of one store per week. Same research, but the artifact becomes a benchmark readers can compare themselves against, which is far more forwardable than an opinion.

C: Combine

Merge the thing with something adjacent: two features into one, your product with a partner's, two audience segments into a shared offering.

Newsletter example: combine the newsletter with a quarterly salary and tooling survey of its own readers. The survey creates original data no competitor can quote without linking, and the newsletter becomes the only place to read the full results.

A: Adapt

Borrow a pattern that already works elsewhere and fit it to your context. Ask "what else is like this, and what do they do that we do not?"

Newsletter example: adapt the sports-media "power rankings" format: a monthly ranked list of e-commerce platforms with movement arrows. Rankings generate disagreement, and disagreement generates replies and shares.

M: Modify (magnify or minify)

Change scale, frequency, intensity or emphasis. Make one attribute much bigger or much smaller and see what breaks or improves.

Newsletter example: minify a weekly 2,000-word issue into a daily 150-word signal, or magnify one issue per quarter into a 30-page industry report priced separately. Both are the same asset at a different amplitude, and each reaches readers the current format misses.

P: Put to another use

Take the asset as-is and point it at a different job, buyer or context. The product does not change; the use does.

Newsletter example: the two-year archive is a training corpus. Repackage it as an onboarding curriculum that e-commerce agencies buy for new hires. The writing already exists; only the wrapper and the buyer are new.

E: Eliminate

Remove a component, step or assumption and see if the whole still works, or works better. Elimination ideas are the cheapest to test because they subtract work instead of adding it.

Newsletter example: eliminate the news roundup section that takes half the writing time. Readers came for analysis; the links padded it. Cutting the section halves production cost and sharpens the product.

R: Reverse (or rearrange)

Invert the order, the roles or the direction of the thing. Who serves whom? What comes first? What if the flow ran backwards? This operation overlaps with full reverse brainstorming, which turns the inversion into an entire session of its own.

Newsletter example: reverse the direction of content: instead of the author telling readers what matters, readers submit their store metrics and the newsletter analyzes one anonymized submission per issue. The audience becomes the source.

SCAMPER prompts you can steal

Run these against your own product, one letter at a time. Answer each in writing, even badly; a weak answer still marks the territory.

• What is the most expensive component, and what is the cheapest thing that could replace it?
• Which two features do users always use together, and what happens if they become one?
• What does the best product in a completely different industry do that we could copy?
• What would this look like at 10 times the frequency? At one tenth?
• Who is using this for a purpose we never intended, and what if we served them on purpose?
• Which step in our flow exists only because it has always existed?
• What if the customer did our job and we did theirs?
• What would we build if the current format were banned tomorrow?

SCAMPER turns "think of something new" into seven small questions you can actually answer.

SCAMPER cheat sheet: letter, operation, question

How to run a SCAMPER session

Give the method 25 to 35 minutes. State the target precisely ("our onboarding flow," not "our product"), then spend 3 to 4 minutes per letter with a quota of at least three ideas each, judgment suspended. Do not skip letters that feel unpromising: Eliminate and Put to another use routinely produce the winners precisely because nobody arrives with those answers prepared. You will finish with 21 or more ideas, most of them mediocre, which is the normal and correct ratio.

Then converge. Cluster the pile into themes, score the survivors on impact against effort, and pick one to test. If you want the whole loop compressed, a SCAMPER brainstorming run in Brainstormer applies all seven operations to your challenge, files each idea by letter, and hands the pile to idea prioritization for scoring, so the session ends with a choice instead of a list. The checklist does the generating either way; your judgment does the choosing.