How to come up with creative ideas: Follow the mission statement and ask questions

[Note: I recently started sharing my scribbles on How to come up with creative ideas. To reiterate, my idea in sharing these is to look back at this list for my own inspiration and for those who are interested.]

I find vision and mission statements of the organizations fascinating. What intrigues me more is how organizations embrace brevity to communicate what they do in a couple of sentences.

In my recent Lean Start-up workshop in Citrix Patras office, one of the section was that of arriving at the vision statement for their ideas.

Few of the characteristics of a good statement include: Inspiring, Aspirational, Paints a Clear Picture, Desirable, Unique, Focused, Feasible, Easy to communicate.

And here's an example of once such statement:
“To land a man on moon and return him safely to earth before the end of the decade.” -  US President, John F Kennedy

One search on the internet will reveal many inspiring statements but the core purpose of me writing this far is not to re-emphasize the importance of vision statements. But really to explore a different dimension regarding these statements.

Source: Twitter (if you are the one who took this pic, let me know
and i will extend the credits)

In one of the recent ideation conversation with the team, I brought forward this statement encompassing (sort of) mission statement for Citrix Workspace. We started looking at this statement from our own perspectives and then following-up with a question, for example:

1. For a Workspace to be considered as an experience (than just a software), what should happen ? What is the current state ?
2. What are my current painpoints at work that I can expect a digital workspace to solve ?
3. What is an adaptive workspace ? What capabilities does it currently have ? What else can add value ?

This exercise led us to quite a few ideas, some of which eventually were patentable (not mentioning here due to confidentiality reasons).

The core point is that a mere statement of a product citing it's direction can result in unimaginable ideas if we keep active questioning and curiosity on.

Do try this technique and share your thoughts.