Brain: Creative Problem Solving with SCAMPER

Image of Luciano Passuello

From Denny: From our friends over at LiteMind comes another useful article for your everyday life. They like to write about efficient and innovative ways to use our minds.

Here is an intriguing article about one of my favorite subjects: creative problem-solving!

This is an excerpt from the post by blog owner Luciano Passuello:

"SCAMPER is a technique you can use to spark your creativity and help you overcome any challenge you may be facing. In essence, SCAMPER is a general-purpose checklist with idea-spurring questions — which is both easy to use and surprisingly powerful.

In this posting, I present a complete SCAMPER primer, along with two free creativity-boosting resources: a downloadable reference mind map and an online tool that generates random questions to get you out of a rut whenever you need.

SCAMPER Primer

SCAMPER is based on the notion that everything new is a modification of something that already exists. Each letter in the acronym represents a different way you can play with the characteristics of what is challenging you to trigger new ideas:

S = Substitute

C = Combine

A = Adapt

M = Magnify

P = Put to Other Uses

E = Eliminate (or Minify)

R = Rearrange (or Reverse)

To use the SCAMPER technique, first state the problem you’d like to solve or the idea you’d like to develop. It can be anything: a challenge in your personal life or business; or maybe a product, service or process you want to improve. After pinpointing the challenge, it’s then a matter of asking questions about it using the SCAMPER checklist to guide you."

For the rest of this great article just click on the title link!