Idea Minimisation
Author: Anni Stavnskaer Pedersen
Facilitated by the teacher
The aim is to allow students to practise their competencies in making decisions within a tight timeframe and to recognise the relevance of intuitive decisions in the innovative process.
30-60 mins
Groups 2-35
Whiteboard, phone, timer, pen & post-its
Steps
- The teacher creates a timeframe for the selection of ideas by the students. Students must respect the timeframe set by the teacher. The purpose of the timeframe is to ‘force’ the students into making decisions quickly without reflection or discussion.
- The students are asked to put all their ideas from the previous idea generation process on the whiteboard on one post-it note per idea. (Review the drawing to your left).
- The teacher draws a small frame on the whiteboard which will accommodate half of the ideas on the whiteboard. (Review the drawing to your left).
- The students are given a set time to select the best ideas to add into the frame. If there are 20 participants, they each are allowed three minutes to select ideas and put them within the smaller frame.
- The ideas which are outside of the frame are discarded. The students now focus on the ideas within the smaller frame.
- The teacher draws a smaller frame on the whiteboard which is large enough to accommodate a third of the ideas. The post-it notes which are inside the frame are placed outside the frame. (Review the drawing to your left).
- The students are given a set time to select the best ideas to add into the smaller frame. If there are 20 participants, they are permitted one minute each to select ideas and put them within the smaller frame.
- The students present their thoughts on the ideas they have put into the smallest frame.
- The following are issues that could be reviewed by the teacher in the conclusion of the activity:
- The different ideas become secondary elements of a shared vision. The teacher guides the students to find a common vision which could incorporate most of the presented ideas. However, as students may have their own points of focus this may prevent them from committing to different ‘niches’ within the common vision.
- More visions = different projects. The students may wish to combine some of their ideas or to create heterogeneous projects which are not united by a common vision. They can work with projects that are not related to each other.
- The students may now develop their chosen ideas. Groups can be formed based on the challenges the students are interested in.
Reflection
This activity is used after the idea-development stage. It offers a quick method for students to select ideas which they feel most motivated to work on. The time allotted to each part of the activity is dependent on the number of students and the timeframe that the teacher has.
The activity could be done using online tools such as Padlet, virtual whiteboard and breakout rooms in Teams/Zoom.
The activity could be done using online tools such as Padlet, virtual whiteboard and breakout rooms in Teams/Zoom.
Inspiration