At our recent 48 Hour Lean Startup workshop I helped guide an optometrist with no idea what he wanted to work on to a gamechanging concept in under 5 minutes.

How?

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What does your day look like?

I see patients.

What else do you do?

Administrative tasks.

How much time do you spend on these tasks?

2 hours a day.

What does this involve?

Updating files. Transferring data. Lodging documents.

Transferring data?

Yes, most of our imaging devices don’t talk to each other and I have to manually export and import data.

This sounds like a manual workaround. Does this take a lot of time?

Yes, I spent about 30 minutes to an hour a day doing this.

Is this a problem that is common across medical profession?

Yes.

If you had a magic wand a product would appear that...

That automated this process.

What would an automated process achieve?

It would save me a lot of time to focus on patient care instead.  

Just like that we identified a common problem which is pervasive across an industry and is a considerable pain point for medical practitioners. Whether or not it can be solved and scaled in any achievable or sustainable manner is another question, however this demonstrates how you can support ideation, when there is no direction at all, simply by asking smart, probing, open-ended questions.

Rubbish in, rubbish out...

What kind of questions are you asking in your brainstorming exercises?