"For all its supposed openness, brainstorming can end up being surprisingly narrow-minded," say authors Jacob Goldenberg, Roni Horowitz, Amnon Levav, and David Mazursky, in the Harvard Business Review article Finding Your Innovation Sweet Spot. Rather than brainstorming to generate ideas, the authors describe a “systematic inventive thinking” (SIT) process based on five "innovation patterns."

I suspect the reason why this kind of systematic approach isn’t used more often in product development ideation is because, as the authors point out, product development often starts with perceived unmet customer need, instead of starting with an existing product, as does SIT. It's counterintuitive to suppose that any truly new ideas could result from an invention process that starts from an existing product. But if the system used is heuristic rather than algorithmic, you’ll be able to get outside of any assumptions about “the fixedness of the product” and yet get the creative benefits of working within a defined problem rather than a facing a blank slate.

Also interesting: the authors refer to research by cognitive psychologist Ronald A. Finke regarding whether form or function should come first in new product development:

“Creative discoveries are more likely to emerge when people analyze a novel form and then imagine the function such a form might perform than when they try to come up with optimal forms to achieve a particular function.”