Mash-Up
What is the Mash-Up card?
Make novel connections to spark fresh ideas.
“The role of the imagination is to create new meanings and to discover connections that, even if obvious, seem to escape detection.” – Paul Rand, 1996
“Mash up da place.” – Ganja Kru, 1994
How to use the Mash-Up card
1. Pick an experience unrelated to your challenge. For example, if you’re coming up with ideas for updating your restaurant’s menu, unrelated experiences could be visiting an aquarium, attending a wedding, or buying shoes.
2. Ask everyone to list as many elements of both your experience and the chosen unrelated experience as they can think of in 5 minutes – the obvious as well as the strange. You can do this using regular sticky notes, or using a Mind Map. If any clear themes emerge, you can group people’s responses to make the next bit easier.
3. Using Eight-Box Blitz, give everyone 15 minutes to come up with ideas for your challenge that combine elements from both experiences.
Example idea (shoes x restaurants): “Offer people different plate/portion sizes for the same meal, based on appetite.”
4. Give each person 2 minutes to share their strongest idea with the rest of the group.
5. Take the strongest ideas from this activity into another Diverge exercise if you want to explore more options, or step straight into Refine mode if you have any ideas that already feel like they answer your challenge.
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Mash-Up is one of 54 ideation workshop cards inside the Idea Tactics card deck.
Ditch creative block and unleash big ideas with your team.