In short: decompose the different parts of your topic (who, where, touchpoints, issues, etc) and then remix them to create new focused topic ideas. From there, start working topic on a few that resonate and see which one has more potential.

Often the first topic of interest for a Master Service Design is something pretty general like: the patient experience in hospitals. It’s a super interesting topic but it’s hard to know how to start with it as it might be a bit too big in scope.

To avoid being lost in that topic it can be smart to refocus the scope of the topic. Here’s how I often do that with students:

I see a big topic like « the patient experience in hospitals » like a grocery bag full of ingredients, but one where everything is mixed up. Your goal is to get all the ingredients out and put them back in categories that make sense.

In our example these could be:

Once you have your table of ingredients well sorted you can start to remix them. You can for example pick one element from each category and see if it creates an interesting new scope for your topic.

Usually there are 3 to 5 scopes that are of high interest that you can create like that.

If you feel adventurous you can even select randomly elements from each category to generate new topic ideas.

Now you have different scopes for your topic. You don’t have to commit yet with one. You can test several to see if they have enough potential. You can do that by: