Brainstorming Ideas

Given a prompt like "ideas for a birthday gift for a coworker who likes hiking," don't produce 3 safe ideas. Produce 30+ across multiple categories in one pass:

CATEGORY: Literal/Direct
1. Premium hiking socks (merino wool)
2. Trail map of a local park, framed
3. Reusable water bladder/hydration pack

CATEGORY: Adjacent/Lateral
4. Subscription to AllTrails Pro
5. Trekking poles
6. A "trail journal" with blank pages + stickers

CATEGORY: Absurd/Provocative (mine for the real idea inside)
7. A GPS tracker shaped like a mountain goat
8. "Hiking bingo" card to gamify their next trip
9. Custom playlist titled "Songs for Steep Inclines"

CATEGORY: Combinatorial (mash two unrelated domains)
10. Hiking + cooking → dehydrated gourmet trail meal kit
11. Hiking + coworking → "walking meeting" voucher for the office

Never stop at the first obvious batch — the first 5-7 ideas are always clichés everyone already thought of. The valuable ideas start around #15-30.

Progress:

• Step 1: Restate the problem as a question ("In what ways might we...?")
• Step 2: Generate volume without filtering (aim for 30-50 raw ideas)
• Step 3: Apply divergence techniques to escape default thinking
• Step 4: Cluster ideas into categories/themes
• Step 5: Flag the 3-5 most promising for development (brief "why it's interesting" note)

Step 1 — Reframe as "How Might We": Turn the blank-page prompt into an open question. "Gift ideas" → "In what ways might we make a coworker feel appreciated using the hiking theme?" This widens the solution space immediately.

Step 2 — Generate without judgment: Quantity over quality, always. Set an explicit numeric target (20, 30, 50). Do not evaluate, critique, or filter during generation — that's a separate pass. Judgment is the #1 killer of ideation momentum.

Step 3 — Use divergence techniques to force new angles. Rotate through these when ideas start repeating:

• SCAMPER: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to other use, Eliminate, Reverse
• Reversal: What's the opposite of the obvious solution? (e.g., "worst possible gift" often reveals a funny/memorable good one)
• Combinatorics: Force-combine the topic with a random unrelated domain (cooking, sports, sci-fi, childhood games)
• Extreme constraints: "What if budget were $0?" / "What if you had unlimited budget?" / "What if it had to fit in a matchbox?"
• Analogies from nature/other industries: "How does Netflix solve this?" "How would a kindergarten teacher solve this?"
• Worst idea first: Generate deliberately bad ideas, then invert or mine them for the kernel of a good one

Step 4 — Cluster: Group raw output into 4-6 labeled categories (e.g., Literal, Lateral, Absurd, Combinatorial, Low-cost, High-effort). This makes volume scannable and reveals gaps.

Step 5 — Surface the best, briefly: Tag 3-5 standouts with a one-line rationale. Don't fully develop them — that's the next, separate task.

Example 1: Input: "Marketing campaign ideas for a struggling local bookstore" Output: 35 ideas across categories — Literal (loyalty card, author signing events, staff picks shelf), Lateral (partner with a coffee roaster for a "chapter & cup" bundle, host a silent book club night), Absurd (vending machine for banned books, "blind date with a book" wrapped in brown paper), Combinatorial (bookstore + escape room → mystery-solving scavenger hunt using clues hidden in books), Digital (TikTok series "60-second book rants" by staff). Top 4 flagged: blind date with a book (low cost, high novelty), escape-room mashup (high effort, high buzz potential), chapter & cup bundle (easy partnership), TikTok series (free, scalable).

Example 2: Input: "Features for a new habit-tracking app — need something different from existing apps" Output: 25 ideas including: reversal-based ("anti-streak" mode where missing a day doesn't reset progress, reducing shame-driven abandonment), combinatorial (habit tracker + social betting → friends stake small amounts on each other's follow-through), nature-analogy (habits visualized as a growing garden instead of a streak number), extreme-constraint (one-tap single-button version for users who abandon apps with too many steps).