SCAMMPERR – As a creativity tool

Michael Michalko is a creativity expert who leads creative-thinking workshops, seminars and sessions for clients around the world. After leaving military service, he applied the creative-thinking techniques that he'd researched to problems in government and business. His instruction, seminars, and creative-thinking.orkshops are popular with corporations, governments, and associations throughout the world.

Michalko created a model to help people explore problems and potential solutions from different angles in order to establish the best solution. The acronym, SCAMMPERR, below is based on that model.

S Substitute What could be substituted in the situation to make the solution work?

C Combine How could ideas or elements be combined to provide a solution?

A AdaptHow could the solution be adapted to make it work?

M MagnifyHow could ideas or elements be magnified to make the solution work?

M ModifyWhat could be modified within the solution to make it work?

P PutWhat might be put to a different use to make the solution work?

E EliminateWhat could be eliminated from the situation to allow the idea to work?

R RearrangeHow could elements be rearranged to enable the solution to work?

R Reverse How might the solution be turned around to make it work? 

SCAMMPERR is a useful model and many people find that it helps them to explore the situation in different ways and arrive at new and quite different approaches.

What's so great about SCAMMPERR is that it has two different uses :

1 -  Generate creative ideas and solutions
You can use SCAMMPERR to generate creative ideas to specific problems, improve a current process or introduce creative ways of providing products and services or improve a procedure, the below example explores new and creative ways for a bank marketing staff using SCAMMPERR to sell more credit cards.

2- SCAMMPERR the brainstormed results
One of the great uses of SCAMMPERR as well is using it as a filter for the results of a brainstorming session. In the example below we run all the ideas we have from brainstorming to focus on the best ideas.

For more creativity tools, check out our Creative Problem Solving & Decision Making instant download training program.