How Might We

We've been using How Might We... to do ideation internally and with our partner organizations and have found them as a great way to spark creativity and a generate a lot of ideas. I would recommend checking out more of IDEO's resources around the design process as well. The Human Centered Design Toolkit (<a href="http://www.ideo.com/work/human-centered-design-toolkit/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ideo.com/work/human-centered-design-toolkit/</a>) and its corresponding community (<a href="http://www.hcdconnect.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.hcdconnect.org</a>) are great, especially if you have a focus on the developing world like we do. Alternatively there is the Bootcamp Bootleg (<a href="http://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/BootcampBootleg2010v2SLIM.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Bootc...</a>) which D-School publishes as a less prescriptive resource with a lot of similar content.

This 'secret' advice is pretty old and it's very useful for prompting a perspective shift. The version I have in my quotes file (from 1998, surely not the first time anyone ever noticed the trick) is:<p>"Beware 'We should', extend a hand to 'How do I'... --Alan Cox, from <a href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/98/10/13/1423253/featurecathedrals-bazaars-and-the-town-council" rel="nofollow">http://news.slashdot.org/story/98/10/13/1423253/featurecathe...</a> (The rest of the paper is pretty good too!)