Idea Brainstorming

 

How might we re-think the coffee experience to reduce waster – [and/or improve recycling] but maintain convenience and flexibility?

The team held a brainstorming activity using a “brain dump” to create multiple solutions to the problem above.  Using Miro, each member documented ideas. Wild and crazy ideas were welcomed. After coming up with as many ideas as the team could think of, the post-its were grouped into categories based on ideas that were similar to each other. The brain dump can be seen below. 

After categorizing the ideas, they were transformed into a PICK chart shown below. A PICK chart is a four-way x,y chart. The x-axis is level of difficulty and ranges from low on the left side to high on the right side. The y-axis is level of payoff with low being on the bottom and high being on the top. Ideas in the bottom left quadrant are ideas that are easy to achieve, but have a low payoff and are deemed “possible.” Ideas in the bottom right quadrant are highly difficult and have a low payoff, so they are ideas that should be “killed.” The top right quadrant represents ideas that are highly difficult, but also have a high pay off. These ideas are considered challenging. Finally, the top left quadrant is the ideas the team wants to focus on because they are easy to implement and have a high pay off.


The team was able to narrow down the ideas by creating this chart. The ideas in the top left quadrant were chosen as the “next best” ideas and are listed below.

  • reusable K-cups
  • plant based K-cups
  • single K-cup that stays inside coffee maker that you fill
  • auto shut off once cup is poured to save energy individually
  • make the K-cups biodegradable
  • coffee packaged in dissolvable plant-based plastic or some material that is soluble in water