Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to use, Eliminate, Reverse

SCAMPER brainstorming for teams, from seven prompts to better challenge questions

SCAMPER brainstorming forces seven transformations on something your company already has: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, Reverse. Teams use it in workshops, and it works just as well as a way to write the questions you put to the whole company in an idea challenge.

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01
What each of the seven letters asks a team to do
02
How to run SCAMPER in a 60 minute team session
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How to turn one letter into a company wide challenge question
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Where the ideas go afterwards so they get a decision

Why SCAMPER works in a team setting

SCAMPER is a checklist, and that is its strength. Instead of asking a room for "any ideas", the facilitator names one concrete transformation at a time and the group has to answer it. Seven narrow prompts beat one wide prompt, because people who go quiet in an open brainstorm usually have something to say when the question is specific.

It works best on something that already exists: a product, a service, an internal process, a campaign. The team is not inventing from nothing, it is bending a known thing in seven directions. That makes it a good fit for operations, product and marketing teams who want improvements they can actually ship.

The weakness is the same in every company. A good SCAMPER session produces forty or fifty options and no mechanism for choosing between them, so the output often ends up as a photo of a whiteboard. The session needs a place where the ideas are written up, compared and decided.

SCAMPER letters as team prompts and as challenge questions
Letter	Prompt in the room	Challenge question for the company
Substitute	What could we swap in the process, material or channel?	What step in customer onboarding could we replace with something simpler?
Combine	Which two things work better together?	Which two internal reports could we merge into one that people actually read?
Adapt	What works elsewhere that we could borrow?	What could we borrow from another industry to cut our quote turnaround time?
Modify	What if we made it bigger, smaller, faster?	How could we cut customer onboarding time in half?
Put to another use	Who else could use what we already have?	Which of our internal tools could we offer to customers?
Eliminate	What could we remove entirely?	Which approval step could we drop without adding risk?
Reverse	What if we did it in the opposite order?	What if customers set up the account before the sales handover, not after?

How to run a SCAMPER session in 60 minutes

Pick one subject and write it at the top: "our customer onboarding", "the monthly sales report", "the returns process". Give each letter five to seven minutes, with everyone writing silently first and then sharing. Silent writing first stops the loudest person from setting the direction for the rest of the room.

Skip letters that clearly do not fit rather than forcing them, and spend the saved time on the letters that produce energy. Eliminate and Reverse tend to produce the ideas people remember, because they question assumptions nobody has said out loud.

Close by asking each person to pick the two ideas they would fund. That gives you a rough first cut, but it is still a vote in the room. For a decision that holds up with leadership, the ideas need to be written up properly and scored against what the company is actually trying to achieve, which is where idea prioritization comes in.

Using SCAMPER to write better idea challenges

The most useful thing SCAMPER does for an innovation program is not the workshop. It is the question. A challenge that asks "How can we improve customer service?" gets vague answers. A challenge built on one SCAMPER letter, such as "Which approval step could we drop without adding risk?", gets specific ones, because it already tells people what kind of idea you want.

In Brainstormer, a challenge is a question, a short description and a deadline, open to everyone in the workspace. Writing three challenges from three different letters over a quarter gives employees three concrete doors in, instead of one generic suggestion form. Our page on innovation challenge software covers how to phrase and time them.

If the team is stuck on the blank page, AI starter ideas give each challenge a handful of examples so the first employee does not face an empty list. Those starters are clearly marked and sit alongside what people submit.

What happens to the ideas after the session

Brainstormer does not have a SCAMPER mode, and we would rather say that plainly. What it does is handle everything after the session. Ideas typed in from the workshop, or submitted by employees to the challenge, are expanded by AI into problem, solution, first step and success measure, so a two line sticky note becomes something a manager can judge.

Each idea is then scored against your own strategic goals for impact, cost, risk and strategic fit, with a written rationale. Near duplicates from different letters, which SCAMPER produces a lot of, are detected and merged with authors and votes kept. The shortlist moves through a pipeline from submitted to implemented, and every stage change is recorded.

You can try the demo on the homepage with one challenge, or read how it works end to end. When you want the whole team on it, see pricing and start your workspace.

Questions

What does SCAMPER stand for?

Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify (sometimes Magnify), Put to another use, Eliminate and Reverse (sometimes Rearrange). Each letter is a transformation the team applies to an existing product, process or service.

Does Brainstormer run SCAMPER automatically?

No. There is no SCAMPER mode. You run the prompts in your session or use them to write challenge questions, and Brainstormer handles the ideas afterwards: AI expansion, scoring against your strategic goals, duplicate merging, voting and a decision pipeline.

How many people should join a SCAMPER workshop?

Four to eight people works well for a live session, so everyone speaks on every letter. For wider input, turn the best letters into challenges open to the whole company and let employees submit over a week or two.

Is SCAMPER good for new products or only existing ones?

It is strongest on something that already exists. For a brand new direction, start with a broad strategic question, for example in a workshop with several perspectives, and use SCAMPER later to refine the chosen direction.