Generating ideas sounds easy until you are faced with a blank page.
One way to overcome this is to use structured ideation techniques that deliberately push your thinking in different directions. But generating a large number of ideas is only the beginning. In continuous product discovery, the objective is not simply to find the most creative idea. It is to identify promising solutions, expose the assumptions behind them and learn which ideas are worth pursuing.
Let’s start with an opportunity.
The Opportunity
Teenagers who like to sleep late need an easy way to have breakfast when they are short of time in the morning.
This is an opportunity statement, not a solution.
That distinction matters. If we immediately decide that teenagers need a breakfast bar, smoothie or app, we have already narrowed the solution space.
The first step is therefore to explore broadly.
1. List Every Idea That Comes to Mind
Start without judging feasibility or quality. The objective is quantity and variety.
For example:
- A healthy smoothie holder attached to a backpack, car or scooter
- Breakfast bars attached to a phone arm holder
- Frozen fruit and nut sticks designed for eating on the go
- Easily resealable yoghurt packaging with an integrated spoon
- Granola in a resealable mixing pouch
At this stage, avoid selecting the best idea. Early evaluation can restrict creativity and cause teams to become attached to the first plausible solution.
In continuous discovery, exploring multiple solutions is important because the first idea is rarely the only way to address an opportunity.
2. Remove a Constraint
Next, identify one assumption that is limiting your thinking and temporarily remove it.
For example, we might be assuming:
Teenagers eat breakfast alone.
What happens if we remove that constraint and imagine breakfast as a social experience?
New possibilities emerge:
- Mini breakfast sandwiches designed for sharing
- Portable breakfast platters for eating with friends
- Music-enabled food containers
- A social app where friends encourage healthy habits
- A virtual breakfast experience connecting friends
Removing constraints does not mean that every resulting idea should be built. Its purpose is to reveal possibilities that our existing assumptions may have hidden.
3. Use an Analogy
Another way to generate ideas is to ask:
What if eating breakfast on the go felt like something completely different?
For example:
What if breakfast felt like a party?
This might inspire:
- Bright, colourful breakfast foods and drinks
- Musical or interactive food packaging
- Rotating breakfast gatherings at friends’ homes
- Breakfast food designed specifically for sharing
- Themed breakfast experiences
Analogies help us borrow characteristics from unrelated experiences and apply them to the opportunity we are exploring.
4. Exaggerate the Problem
Take an idea to an unreasonable extreme.
Imagine that teenagers needed to eat ten apples every morning.
What solutions might that create?
- A concentrated ten-apple breakfast drink
- A portable apple breakfast pie
- Apple and peanut butter breakfast sandwiches
- A wearable breakfast carrier
- A modular breakfast belt with compartments for food and drinks
The ideas may sound ridiculous, but that is precisely the point.
Exaggeration breaks conventional thinking. The final product may have nothing to do with ten apples, but the exercise could reveal interesting concepts around portability, concentration, packaging or modularity.
5. Generate Deliberately Bad Ideas
If you are still struggling, try generating ideas you would never recommend.
For example:
- An automatic breakfast dispenser beside the bed
- A breakfast-replacement pill
- An absurdly expensive celebrity-inspired smoothie
- A cup that plays music every time you drink
- A bed that physically ejects teenagers when they are running late
Bad ideas remove the pressure to be correct.
More importantly, an apparently terrible idea can contain the seed of something useful. A breakfast dispenser might inspire automated preparation. A musical cup might suggest gamification. A ridiculous wake-up system might prompt reflection on how morning routines influence the underlying problem.
Don’t just throw bad ideas away. Ask:
What is interesting about this idea, despite everything that is wrong with it?
From Ideation to Continuous Discovery
At this point, we have generated many possible solutions.
Traditionally, a team might now select the idea it considers “best” and begin building it.
Continuous discovery suggests a different approach.
Instead of asking only:
Which idea do we like most?
We should also ask:
What assumptions would need to be true for this idea to succeed?
Consider the smoothie holder.
We are assuming that teenagers want smoothies, that they have time to prepare them, that carrying them is the main problem and that attaching a holder to something they already carry would improve their experience.
Each of those assumptions could be wrong.
The same applies to the VR Breakfast Go concept. Before building an app, we would need to understand whether teenagers actually want to share their breakfast habits, whether social interaction would encourage breakfast consumption and whether an app solves a meaningful part of the original opportunity.
This is where ideas become hypotheses rather than commitments.
Compare Ideas Across Different Dimensions
Different solutions may be promising for different reasons.
Useful: A smoothie holder could make an existing behaviour easier without requiring teenagers to adopt an entirely new routine.
Desirable: A social breakfast experience could potentially make breakfast more engaging by connecting it with friendships and shared experiences.
Easy to test: A portable sharing plate could be explored using existing products without developing anything new.
Functional: A breakfast bar holder attached to an existing accessory could reuse something teenagers already carry.
Sustainable: Edible or low-waste packaging concepts could reduce unnecessary packaging while making breakfast more portable.
These criteria help us compare solutions, but they should not be confused with evidence.
Calling an idea “desirable” does not mean customers actually desire it.
That still needs to be tested.
Test Assumptions Before Building
The next step is not necessarily to develop the winning idea.
Instead, identify the assumptions that present the greatest risk.
For a smoothie holder, a team might test whether teenagers already consume smoothies or would consider doing so.
For a social breakfast app, the riskiest assumption might be whether teenagers are interested in sharing this part of their daily lives.
For a portable sharing concept, the team could observe whether teenagers actually want to eat together during their journey to school.
Small experiments, interviews and simple prototypes can help answer these questions before significant investment is made.
The Bigger Lesson
Good ideation is not about having one brilliant idea.
It is about creating enough possibilities to avoid becoming attached to the first solution that comes to mind.
Structured techniques such as removing constraints, using analogies, exaggerating and deliberately generating bad ideas can expand the solution space. Continuous discovery then takes the process further by connecting those ideas back to customer opportunities and testing the assumptions behind the most promising solutions.
The journey is therefore not simply:
Problem → Idea → Build
It becomes:
Opportunity → Multiple Solutions → Assumptions → Experiments → Learning
And when new evidence emerges, the cycle begins again.
The objective is not to prove that our favourite idea is right. It is to learn which solution has the best chance of creating value before we invest heavily in building it.
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