Seven action verbs that turn something that already exists into something new.
SCAMPER is a checklist for changing things. Instead of staring at a blank page and asking “any ideas?”, you take something that already exists, like a product, a service, a process or a lesson plan, and push on it from seven deliberate directions.
Each letter is a verb, and each verb is a question. Substitute something. Combine it with something. Adapt an idea from elsewhere. Modify it. Put it to another use. Eliminate a part. Reverse or rearrange it. Work through all seven and you'll have dozens of ideas, including a few you'd never have reached on your own.
Use it when you're improving something that already exists, when a team keeps circling the same few ideas, or when you need a structured way to get a group started.
Choose a part of the diagram or a tab to explore each lens.
What could you swap in to replace part of it?
What could you join together to make something new?
What already works somewhere else that you could borrow?
What could you make bigger, smaller, faster, more frequent or different in form?
How else could this be used, or who else could use it?
What could you remove, simplify or do without?
What if you turned it around, changed the order or swapped roles?
SCAMPER looks simple, but it works on several well-known features of how people think.
Asked for “any ideas?”, most minds freeze or grab the first familiar answer. A specific action like swap it, shrink it or flip it tells your thinking where to go. Focused prompts reliably produce more ideas, and more varied ones, than an open request.
We tend to see things only as they're normally used. Psychologists call this functional fixedness. Each letter loosens one assumption at a time: the material, the order, the user, the purpose.
A great deal of innovation comes from modifying or recombining things that already exist. SCAMPER turns that remixing into a deliberate habit, so it no longer depends on luck.
Seven lenses give a team a shared, systematic route through the problem, so you don't spend an hour on one angle and never look at the other six.
Pick one specific thing to improve and say what “better” looks like. “Our weekly office hours, so that more students get help before the midterm” works. “Education” doesn't.
List its pieces: who, where, when, format, materials, steps. SCAMPER works better on parts than on wholes. “Substitute the location” is easier to answer than “Substitute office hours”.
Take one letter at a time. Ask its trigger questions about each part and write down every answer. Aim for quantity. Some letters will produce plenty and some very little. That's normal.
When a letter runs dry, try combining two lenses (Eliminate + Reverse) or make the idea ten times bigger. Your third or fourth idea on a letter is usually better than your first.
Only now do you start judging. Group similar ideas, then shortlist with a quick NUF Test: how New, Useful and Feasible is each one?
Turn your top one to three ideas into small experiments you can run in a week or two. Decide in advance what result would count as success.
A whiteboard or seven sticky-note columns labeled S‑C‑A‑M‑P‑E‑R, a timer and 30–45 minutes. With AI, all you need is the prompt below.
Subject: weekly office hours for a 120-student intro course. Goal: more students get help early. Constraint: no extra budget, 3 hours a week.
Replace the office with a shared online question board that students can post to any time. Answer in batches.
Merge office hours with the problem set: the first 20 minutes are a live walk-through of a worked problem.
Borrow a restaurant waitlist: students join a queue from their phone and get a ping when it's their turn.
“Micro office hours”: ten-minute slots five days a week instead of one two-hour block.
Record common questions as two-minute clips that become a searchable FAQ for next year's class.
Remove the booking step, and the feeling that you need a “good” question before you're allowed to come.
Swap roles: students run peer help sessions and the instructor drops in for the hardest questions.
23 raw ideas in 25 minutes. These were the favorites from each lens, and three made the shortlist below.
The slowest part of SCAMPER is coming up with enough variety for all seven letters, and that's where AI is strongest. What AI does worst is knowing what matters in your world, and that's where you're strongest. Divide the work that way.
Run one letter at a time so the ideas go deep instead of staying shallow.
Give me 5 Substitute ideas for my office hours: four practical, one outrageous.
Strengthen the Adapt lens by bringing in patterns from other fields.
How do restaurants, airlines and video games handle waiting? Adapt each one to office hours.
Combine ideas from different letters into hybrids neither would reach alone.
Merge idea S2 with idea R1 into one new concept and give it a name.
Let AI find the weak spots in your idea before reality does.
Argue against my top idea, then design a one-week test that could prove you wrong.
Describe your challenge, pick a mode, then copy the prompt into Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot. In coach mode the AI takes you through one lens at a time and waits for your ideas before adding its own.
The “Open in” links put the prompt in the web address. If your challenge includes anything sensitive, copy and paste instead.
After the session, click one to copy it, then paste it into the same chat.