brainstorming-research-ideas

What it does

Guides researchers through structured ideation frameworks to discover high-impact research directions. It provides ten complementary ideation lenses to move from vague curiosity to concrete, defensible research proposals, and offers an integrated workflow to generate candidates and converge on strong ideas.

How it works

The skill outlines ten frameworks, each with a workflow and self-checks, and an Integrated Brainstorming Workflow:

• Problem-First vs. Solution-First Thinking: steps include drafting one-sentence idea, classifying mode, and validating the problem or identifying two problems addressed by a solution.
• The Abstraction Ladder: move up, down, or sideways through steps that state focus, generalize, instantiate, and analogize, plus evaluation questions for publishable contributions at each level.
• Tension and Contradiction Hunting: identify top desiderata, pair trade-offs, assess whether reconciliation or Pareto frontier framing is the contribution.
• Cross-Pollination (Analogy Transfer): describe problem, find structurally similar solutions from another field, map back, generate testable predictions, and validate impact.
• The What Changed? Principle: pick a past negative result, revisit assumptions under new conditions, frame contribution when assumptions changed.
• Failure Analysis and Boundary Probing: select a method, identify assumptions, systematically violate them, document failures, diagnose causes, propose fixes.
• The Simplicity Test: strip to simplest core, build minimal version, compare fairly, decide if simplicity suffices; provides wording for contribution framing.
• Stakeholder Rotation: analyze from multiple perspectives (user, developer, theorist, adversary, ethicist, regulator, operator) to surface concerns.
• Composition and Decomposition: combine two techniques or decompose a complex method, evaluate emergent capabilities or dominant components.
• The Explain It to Someone Test: two-sentence defensibility template with problem and insight, plus calibration questions.
• Integrated Brainstorming Workflow: Phase 1 Diverge (generate 10-20 candidates), Phase 2 Converge (filter to 3-5), Phase 3 Refine (develop a concrete plan with experiments and risk responses).

Phase-by-phase guidance uses explicit steps and checklists to move from idea to concrete plan.

When to use it

Use when starting a new research direction, feeling stuck on a project, evaluating half-formed ideas, preparing for brainstorming with collaborators, transitioning between areas, or reviewing a field to identify underexplored gaps. Do not use when you already have a well-defined question requiring execution or literature review tasks.

What it can touch

The skill references a dependency on Claude Code for ideation workflows and does not specify execution tooling beyond its ten frameworks and associated workflows. It does not list additional scripts or tools beyond the described frameworks.

Caveats

It does not provide experimental methods or literature reviews. It cautions against using it for execution guidance, methodological design, or literature reviews, and it emphasizes clear problem definitions and testable predictions within the ideation context.