Most people stop at the first few ideas they have. The obvious ones arrive quickly, feel good enough and end the search. SCAMPER is a simple way to keep going in a structured manner. It is a checklist of seven questions that you apply to an existing idea, product or process in order to force new variations.

What SCAMPER stands for

The method builds on questions proposed by Alex Osborn, the advertising executive who popularised brainstorming, and was arranged into the SCAMPER acronym by Bob Eberle in the early 1970s. Each letter is a prompt.

S, Substitute. What could you replace? A material, a component, a person, a place, a rule. What if the handle were made of something else, or the service delivered by someone else?

C, Combine. What could you merge with it? Two functions, two products, two audiences. A phone with a camera is a combination, as is a tool that is also a container.

A, Adapt. What else is like this, and what could you borrow? Look at other fields, other times and other species for a solution to a similar problem.

M, Modify. What could you change in size, shape, colour or intensity? Magnify it, shrink it, exaggerate a feature, add a detail.

P, Put to another use. Who else could use it, and for what? A product built for one group often finds a second life with another.

E, Eliminate. What could you remove? Simplify, strip a feature, cut a step. Removal often reveals what the core of the idea actually is.

R, Reverse. What if you flipped the order, the roles or the direction? Turn it inside out, run the process backwards, let the customer do what the company did.

How to run a session

Choose a real, concrete subject, such as a water bottle, a login screen or a school timetable. Write it at the top of a page. Take each prompt in turn and write at least two answers, however silly. Do not judge while you write.

Time box it. Five to ten minutes for a first pass is plenty. When you finish, read everything and mark the three answers that surprise you most. Sketch those, and then ask which of them solves a real problem for a real person.

What to expect

Many answers will be poor. That is normal, because the aim is coverage, not quality. A few will open a direction you would not have reached by free association. The checklist works by making you look in places you would otherwise skip.

SCAMPER is best for improving something that already exists. When you need a genuinely new concept, combine it with other techniques such as analogy from another field, and always follow it with a separate step to converge on the ideas worth developing.

Practise it

Our course on Idea Generation and Brainstorming covers SCAMPER in context with divergent techniques, group formats and convergence. It pairs well with Problem Framing and Design Thinking.

Further reading: Alex F. Osborn, Applied Imagination; Bob Eberle, SCAMPER: Games for Imagination Development.