Table of Contents
Table of Contents

Collaboration

In any team, you’ll work with people who have different experiences, mindsets, and backgrounds. Collaboration traditionally allows people to come together to tackle a shared challenge, with stakeholders coming in at various stages of the process and contributing their skills and expertise before passing the work along.

At IDEO U, we believe in creative collaboration—a type of collaboration that addresses complex issues and harnesses the power of diverse perspectives and creativity to develop innovative ideas and solutions. Over the years, we've learned that a creative mindset helps us imagine new possibilities and make unexpected connections, while a diversity of disciplines and backgrounds expands the kinds of ideas that will surface. This is a journey and takes time to develop, and—trust us—that journey never stops. Rather than solely focusing on execution and efficiency, creative collaboration empowers teams to tackle today’s complex challenges by navigating changing conditions, unearthing bold insights, and embracing a new way of working.

Examples of Creative Collaboration

A challenge that is big, ambiguous, and in need of a radically new solution is a perfect candidate for creative collaboration. Many of our projects at IDEO center around these kinds of complex and ambiguous questions, such as: “How might we design waste out of the food system?” Creative collaboration is useful when you have a question with no clear answer and many potential solutions.

Read examples and case studies on how we’ve used creative collaboration to tackle bold challenges:

Why Collaboration Is Important

Since there’s no single answer to the types of challenges we face today, we need to look at problems from many different perspectives. With the creative collaboration process, you can expand the number and range of ideas—including risky, scary, and potentially groundbreaking ones. It allows teams to thrive in uncertainty, use iteration to spark creativity, work through challenges together, and turn tensions between ideas into opportunities.

A choreographed creative collaboration process takes teams beyond individual brainstorming sessions and keeps them on track through multiple iterations of work. As a collaborator, you can signal the stage your team is in, the mindsets they should embody, and the moments when they should shift gears. Embracing the methods and techniques of creative collaboration provides structure to the process through team practices, rituals, and agreements.

Listen to Former IDEO Partner and Instructor of Cultivating Creative Collaboration, Mike Peng, explain the value of creative collaboration on IDEO U’s Creative Confidence Podcast.



  • Divergence and Convergence

The design thinking creative process: diverge to create choices, converge to refine ideas and make decisions, and repeat. The design thinking creative process: diverge to create choices, converge to refine ideas and make decisions, and repeat.

The Creative Process consists of cycles of divergent and convergent thinking.


  • The Creative Process contains multiple cycles of iteration—with each phase, you move closer to a refined solution.
  • In Divergence—teams go wide to find insights and generate new ideas.
  • In Convergence—teams narrow their focus by refining ideas and synthesizing information.


While it might appear messy and spontaneous from the outside, collaboration isn’t just a free-for-all. Collaborating in a way that surfaces wild new ideas takes intention and planning. To empower creative collaboration, we need a process that unlocks the creativity of diverse teams. Two main modes of thinking during creative collaboration—divergent and convergent thinking—are used in tandem to create and make choices. Divergence allows teams to come up with as many ideas as possible, while convergence homes in on what’s most important.

  • An Iterative Process

The creative collaboration iterative process. Narrowing down the right idea takes multiple rounds of diverging and converging. The creative collaboration iterative process. Narrowing down the right idea takes multiple rounds of diverging and converging.


While there’s a misconception that the process is linear, with ideas starting broad before getting increasingly narrow—creative collaboration includes multiple rounds of divergent and convergent thinking. In a first round your team might imagine all the possibilities of what a solution could be, before moving into what it realistically should be, what it ultimately will be, and then the actual prototype. This iterative process allows groups to combine the best elements of different options and refine them into completely new concepts by incorporating feedback and discussion.



Listen to IDEO Senior Director of Global Learning and Development and Instructor of Cultivating Creative Collaboration, Heather Currier Hunt, share her advice on embracing tension on IDEO U’s Creative Confidence Podcast.

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