Innovation workshop activities that end up somewhere useful

Brainwriting 6-3-5. Six people each write three ideas in five minutes on a sheet, then pass the sheet to the left and build on what is there. After six rounds you have up to 108 entries, and nobody had to speak first. Afterwards each person enters their strongest two or three rows into the challenge as ideas of two sentences.

Reverse brainstorming. Ask the room how they could make onboarding twice as slow. People are surprisingly specific about how to cause problems. Invert each answer into a fix and enter the fixes. This activity is good at surfacing causes that everyone knows about and nobody has written down.

SCAMPER. Walk an existing process through Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate and Reverse, a few minutes each. It works best on something concrete, like the welcome email sequence or the approval step in procurement. Our SCAMPER brainstorming page has prompts for each letter.

Six perspectives. Run an AI workshop on the challenge question. It answers from the Optimist, Skeptic, Customer, Engineer, Marketer and Visionary positions, and you can send the results into the challenge as ideas. Use it when the room is too homogeneous, for example a workshop made up only of engineers. The method behind it is described on our six thinking hats tool page.

After generating, run duplicate detection in the challenge. Brainstormer merges similar ideas and keeps every author and every vote, so the list shrinks without anyone losing credit. Then group ideas into themes. Walking the room through five themes takes ten minutes, walking through sixty cards takes an hour.

Dot voting still has a place, and in Brainstormer it is simply member votes on each idea. Combine the votes with the AI scores for impact, cost, risk and strategic fit, each on a one to ten scale with a written rationale and a weighted total based on your company goals. When the vote and the score disagree, that is the most useful conversation of the day: either the room knows something the goals do not capture, or the room is excited about something that does not serve the strategy. More on this step is on the idea prioritization page.

Close with an impact and effort sort of the top ten and move three to five ideas to shortlisted. Each stage change is logged with the person, the time and a note, which gives the follow up meeting a clear starting point.

Four hours is the right default for one real challenge and a cross-functional group of about eight. Shorter than ninety minutes and you cannot both generate and decide. Longer than a day and the attendance costs more than the decision is worth.

Look at the shape. Generating gets ninety minutes, converging gets ninety, and the commit block is protected at the end instead of being what gets squeezed when the session runs long. If you book a full day, double the converging time, not the generating time.

In Brainstormer the cluster and score blocks shrink, because duplicate detection, theme grouping and goal scoring run on the challenge while the room takes its break. The shortlist moves into the decision pipeline with an owner on each idea, and Business and Enterprise plans produce a board report you can send the same afternoon.

Move generating fully asynchronous and keep the live call to ninety minutes of clustering, scoring and commitment. The silent creative round is where remote sessions fail, because eight muted faces staring at a shared board is a poor place to think. Take that round out of the call.

Open the challenge two days before the session. Everyone adds ideas on their own schedule, in writing, and anonymous submission keeps the most senior person's first comment from setting the direction. The call then opens with a full list that AI has already expanded, merged and grouped, and spends its whole length on the argument and the decision. Give each scoring round a visible timer, and let one person share the screen for the converging block.

A realistic agenda for one challenge: fifteen minutes for the How Might We rewrite, thirty minutes of brainwriting, twenty minutes of reverse brainstorming or an AI workshop, ten minutes for merging duplicates and themes, and fifteen minutes for voting and shortlisting. Enter ideas during the rounds, not after, so the scoring is ready when you need it.

For a half day, add a SCAMPER round on the most promising theme and a second shortlisting pass. Keep the challenge open for a week after the session so people who think slowly can still contribute. The tool side of running such a session is covered on the innovation workshop tool page, and the plans that include AI workshops are listed on pricing.