To exercise various techniques for generating new ideas.

Pick a topic that is of interest to you. This does not need to be in the area of class learning.. Your topic should also be unrelated to topics other group members are selecting. Make sure to check with each other. For your topic prepare a VAOW goal statement.

• Verb - an action verb like improve, reduce, optimize, enhance, etc. This should be an action that will make things better for your users.
• Attribute - some attribute such as: size, readability, cost, excitement, etc. This is some property of the object of interest.
• Object - The thing that is to become better because of your actions. This might be a website, a robot, a newspaper, medical care, a taxi, etc.
• Who - From who's perspective will this get better.

Examples:

• Lower the cost of taxi rides for people landing at JFK airport.
• Raise learning retention of third graders for their parents

There should be a paragraph in your report giving your VAOW statement for the problem you selected along with a rationale for why you selected that problem.

Use three of the idea generation techniques that were presented on the web pages. For each technique that you chose, generate 5 new ideas that match your VAOW statement. Write a short paragraph describing each idea (a total of 15 ideas). Though you will only report 15 ideas, it is recommended that you generate many more of them and then pick the best ones. It is best to generate a lot of ideas and write them down rapidly rather than try to filter them at the same time as you generate them.

Submit a Word document that contains your VAOW statement along with its rationale paragraph and the 15 paragraphs describing your generated ideas. With each idea paragraph give the technique used to generate that idea.

• Is your VAOW statement appropriately formed
• Does your rationale describe a really, really interesting problem?
• Did you correctly apply each of the idea generation techniques.
• Are your ideas interesting and potentially useful.