135,000,000 – the number of articles/entries in Google for innovation tools and techniques. With this much information and ‘cheat sheets’ available on this subject – how can you gain the competitive edge when using these widely available tools and techniques.

The heart of this answer is people. Understanding how they work, their motivations and indeed who they work best with. Below are 10 ways to make innovation tools work harder for you:

1. Friends 4ever

The intimacy that exists within friendship pairs breeds the perfect challenge and build environment. Consider tasking friendship pairs to explore and ideate within an opportunity space.

2. Creative co-ops

Within a given setting, people perform better when they feel they are bringing something special and different to the table. Screen workshop participants to create the ideal working group – a balance between: radicals, dreamers, plagiarists and rationalists

3. Weekday holidaying

A change is as good as a holiday. Mix up the working environment throughout the day: café, bar, market, pub, playground, home etc etc – let the surroundings to act as stimulus

4. Come Dine with Me

By nature, people are competitive. Leverage this by setting up a round robin style competition to maintain energy and interest in a workshop session

5. Steal with pride

There are a lot of great ideas out there which can inspire us. Comb blogs/newsletters/street press to gain inspiration on workshop and online tasks to get that get people thinking about issues outside of the box. Treasure hunt? Supper club? Quiz night? Festival? Murder mystery?

6. Expressive funnels

People express themselves in different ways – Verbal? Visual? Kinesthetic?. Pre-session screening to ascertain consumers/workshop attendees preferred expressive means

7. Tension exploitation

We live in a society where there are greater uncertainties and pressures in our lives. Understand the cultural tensions at play and use this as a springboard for innovation development

8. Googlerama

People use Google – a lot. Leverage the availability of on-line analytics companies to make sense of the millions of Google searches a day to identify and prioritise opportunity areas pre-workshop

9. Back to basics

Sometimes people overthink things. Stretch people’s imagination…what are 50 different uses for butter?

10. Naughty & nice

People tend to behave in a rather virtuous manner. Give them permission to release their inner devil

Rather than seeing the above tips as a list to tick off in every session – consider this a start point to provoke thinking. Often only one or two of these are needed to shift the dynamic within a consumer co-creation session from one can be rational judgement to inspirational, creative, fun…and impactful!