Ideation – What is that?
To Ideate or not to Ideate? That is the question.
“Ideate” simply means to form an idea, thought or image of; to form ideas, think. (Dictionary.com)
“Ideation” is the process of forming and relating ideas. Ideation means to conceive or generate an idea and implement it. Ideation means to conceptualize an idea. It is the thought processes involved in apprehending and expressing a new concept, often in a graphical format. Here at AltaSim, we talk about “Tomorrow’s Technology Today” in most everything we do. Tomorrow’s technology started with today’s (or yesterday’s) idea. Almost all of the projects we get to work on are time sensitive for various reasons. Somebody somewhere was practicing Ideation before we got involved.
What happens when Ideation is constantly interrupted? What happens when today’s solution is delayed because yesterday’s tools cannot get us quickly to tomorrow? What happens when different users in different departments using different tools try to communicate about the same solution? Ideation comes to a screeching halt.
CAD is a great tool. We all know that. But often, CAD becomes a bottleneck when different users in different departments try to communicate with each other during the process of Ideation. Somewhere between Concept, Design, Analysis, Production, and Go-to-Market, this process often becomes “hurry-up-and-wait”. This kills Ideation. So on one end of the spectrum, there are people being encouraged to ideate more and more. On the other end of the spectrum, there are people frustrating and discouraging those ideating, without really knowing it. And somewhere there’s a group of people who are saying… “This product NEEDS to get to Market!” We believe SpaceClaim solves this problem!
What would it look like in your organization if the bottleneck never occurred? What could happen to revenues if so much time wasn’t lost in the process? Can you imagine what tomorrow’s products you would already have conceptualized, designed, analyzed, produced and on the market today? Think about it… now that’s some really good Ideation.