Brainstorms

Intro

The goal of Brainstorms is to help you come up with promising new business ideas by ideating on the four core components of an idea: the customer, the customer's job, problems the customer has with that job, and possible solutions to those problems. Once you've identified a number of possibilities, you can choose the best idea and take it through the rest of the process defined in your innovation program.

Getting Started

From the Brainstorms section of LaunchPath, click the "New Brainstorm" button. You'll see a few options for how to start your Brainstorm.

You can start from scratch, where you'll begin with a customer, then ideate core business ideas around that customer.

You can also start by providing some context from which you want to ideate business ideas. When you start a Brainstorm of this type, the AI will use the provided context to generate a few complete business ideas, which you can then develop and expand on.

The context you provide can be free-form text, where you use plain language to describe any details you'd like to start from, such as industry, the type of solution (such as software or services), and any relevant characteristics of the target customer. You can also paste in long-form content such as articles and patent abstracts. The more information you provide, the better the results will be. But avoid proprietary information, such as names of internal programs or processes – the AI will likely not be familiar with those things, and they will not contribute to the output.

You can also start a Brainstorm by providing a URL as context. The AI will retrieve the content from that page and generate ideas based on that content. URLs provided here should be publicly available, meaning they are not behind any paywall or logins. Not all URLs will work well for this feature, and you may need to instead copy and paste content from the website into the "input text" Brainstorm type.

Start a Brainstorm from Scratch

The Brainstorm prompts you to start by adding a customer. You can then add a job by clicking the plus button on the customer node, then add a problem for that job in the same way. You can add multiple jobs, problems, and solutions.

You can use a Brainstorm in this way to record your own ideas, but you can also invoke the help of AI to spark new possibilities you might not have thought of.

Explode

Going back to the customer you created, click the customer node to select it, and you'll see the "Explode" button in the top bar activate. ("Explode" only works if exactly one node is selected.) When we click "Explode", the AI will ideate in the same manner we would, but faster and with access to much more information. We can use the "Explode" feature on any node, and the AI will generate new branches for that node.

Move the Idea Forward

Once you've identified an idea you want to move forward in your organization's innovation process, select the Solution, then click "New Idea From Selection". Adjust any of the fields if needed, then click "Save as Private Draft". Now you can develop your idea further using the complete idea canvas and take it through the rest of the innovation process.

Tips for improving AI results

When starting a Brainstorm from text, or when adding your own nodes which you want to then "Explode" through AI, it's important to provide information that will help the AI think thoroughly and precisely about the context.

• Avoid proprietary, internal names and terminology for things like processes or systems.
• Do refer to well-known concepts by name where applicable. (If there's a lot of content on the internet about a topic, the AI will know about it and can integrate that knowledge in its generations.)