Generating New Ideas Together
A short lesson on Context Maps for collaborative ideation
May 2, 20261 min read
Most ideation sessions fail not because teams lack creativity, but because they share too narrow a frame. The Context Map is a 60-minute fix.
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"text": "Most ideation sessions fail not because teams lack creativity, but because everyone walks in sharing the same frame for the problem. You generate variations on the same idea, mistake them for diversity, and ship something close to where you started.",
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"text": "What the Context Map does",
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"text": "The Context Map widens the frame before narrowing it. In 60–90 minutes, a team systematically explores the user, social, regulatory, technological, and competitive contexts surrounding the problem — and the assumptions hidden in each.",
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"text": "How to run it",
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"text": "Silent-write first. Each participant lists what they think they know in each context, on their own. Then surface the writes one context at a time — not by speaker, but by context. The disagreements are the gold; consensus is suspicious.",
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"text": "Watch the video and download the worksheet at innovation.io/free.",
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