Ideas do not come easy. Morphological analysis is a technique that works with different types of data to give you a single idea. Sometimes works, sometimes not. This fits loosely into the marketing section of the book, but really is an eye opener  for designing menus.

Effectively if you take the different strands of your idea such as [Food] [Cooking method] [Side dish] and have multiple options in each [one of these] you are doing a form of morphological analysis. The general idea is to create a column of ideas under each heading and then randomly pick an idea from one of each.

The Excel spreadsheet below has a grid on the “Options” tab to show a main course (columns 1 & 2) and a the accompaniment (columns 3 & 4).  On the “Ideas” tab a random selection is shown of those 4 columns. Press F9 on the keyboard and Excel will provide different options. If you populate each column, upto the bar marked 20 at maximum, this will work for any idea.

Right click to download Morphological_Analysis.xls