General overview of how to implement it
At any point in a creative-thinking situation, alone or in a group, novel solutions emerge when those involved force themselves to think in an arbitrarily different way. For that reason, using any or all of the seven thinking approaches will help those who use them produce surprising and sometimes very useful results.
In order to properly apply this technique, you can follow the proposed scheme:
- Identify the aim of your activity – why do you want to apply the SCAMPER technique? What do you want to achieve? – i.e., maybe you want to develop a new assessment methodology to evaluate your students’ performance, or maybe you want them to reflect on a given topic or to create an innovative product/service.
- Start questioning yourself/your students under each one of the 7 different perspectives.
- Once you’ve collected all the answers and ideas, it’s the time to carefully reflect on them and make decisions. If the SCAMPER technique is being celebrated in a group dynamic, you can enhance dialogue among learners or peers. Are these concepts feasible and realistic, or are they impractical? To select the best ideas, you will need to obtain and record a large number of ideas during the ideation time, and then, we proposed you two different ways of sorting them out:
- Vote: Individuals are asked to select the 3 ideas/solutions thought to be more feasible and effective, and the ideas with the most votes are selected.
- Conceptual grouping: it is often easy to generate 2 or 3 main concepts with an associated group of ideas and then discuss each concept and proposed ideas/solutions within. Which approach is the most likely to success?
Here are some possible questions to propose during the session. However, remember that they may be absolutely different depending on the given topic or the objectives of the activity.
The following questions were proposed by Alex Osborn and then adapted for literary analysis[1]:
| Substitute | What materials or resources can you substitute or swap to improve the novel solutions?What other novel solutions or processes could you use?Can you use this product somewhere else, or as a substitute for something else?What will happen if you change your feelings or attitude toward this novel solution? |
| Combine | What would happen if you combined this product with another, to create something new?What if you combined purposes or objectives?How could you combine talent and resources to create a new approach to this novel solution? |
| Adapt | What other context could you put your novel solutions into?What other novel solutions or ideas could you use for inspiration?How could you adapt or readjust this product to serve another purpose or use? |
| Modify | How could you change the shape, look, or feel of your novel solutions?What could you add to modify this novel solution?What could you emphasize or highlight to create more value?What element of this novel solution could you strengthen to create something new? |
| Put on another use | How would this novel solution behave differently in another setting?Who else could use this novel solution?Can you use this novel solution somewhere else, perhaps in another industry? |
| Eliminate | What features, parts, or rules could you eliminate?What would happen if you took away part of this novel solution? What would you have in its place?How could you streamline or simplify this novel solution? |
| Reverse | What would happen if you reversed this process or sequenced things differently?What if you try to do the exact opposite of what you’re trying to do now?What components could you substitute to change the order of this novel solution?What roles could you reverse or swap?How could you reorganize this novel solution? |
