SCAMPER

by danium

SCAMPER is an AI Engineering skill for Claude Code, published by danium in lateral-thinking.

216 stars14 forkson danium/lateral-thinkingAdded 2026/08/11+88% in starsRepository updated 2026/07/09

View source on GitHub Download repo ZIP

agent-skillsbrainstormingclaude-codecodexcreativitylateral-thinking

Install in seconds

Install SCAMPER

Copy SCAMPER into your Claude Code skills folder. Run the command in your terminal, or review the source on GitHub before installing.

terminal

npx degit https://github.com/danium/lateral-thinking/tree/main/skills/scamper ~/.claude/skills/scamper

Requires Node.js. Downloads this skill only — not the rest of the repository — into your Claude Code skills folder.

Without Node.js

git clone https://github.com/danium/lateral-thinking.git

Clones the whole repository, then copy the skill’s own directory into your skills folder yourself.

In this catalog

Source file: skills/scamper/SKILL.md in danium/lateral-thinking
Installs to: ~/.claude/skills/scamper
Collection: One of 9 skills cataloged from this repository
Category: AI Engineering — 2451 skills

What SCAMPER does

A structured creativity technique that pushes an existing idea through seven transformation lenses (Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to other use, Eliminate, Reverse) to generate disciplined variations. Use when you need to riff on a feature, product, or workflow.

SCAMPER is cataloged under AI Engineering on DirSkills. SCAMPER comes from a repository tagged agent-skills, brainstorming, claude-code, codex and creativity.

Documentation

README

Excerpt

SCAMPER

What this technique does

Take one existing thing — a feature, a product, a workflow — and push it through seven transformation lenses in fixed order. Each lens asks a different question: what could you swap out, what could you fuse it with, what could you borrow, what could you exaggerate or shrink, what else it could do, what could you cut, what could you flip. The value is coverage: the checklist forces you past the two or three variations you would have thought of unaided and into the ones you would have skipped. It is a divergent tool for an idea that already exists, not a way to invent one from nothing.

Source: Bob Eberle, SCAMPER: Games for Imagination Development (1971), building on Alex Osborn's checklist of idea-spurring questions.

Workflow

This is the opening of the README. Read the full README on GitHub.

Frequently asked about SCAMPER

What else does danium publish alongside SCAMPER?
SCAMPER is one of 9 skills that DirSkills catalogs from danium/lateral-thinking, the repository it ships in. Its siblings there include Assumption Inversion, Concept Fan and Forced Analogy. Each one is a separate skill with its own page in this directory, installs the same way SCAMPER does, and is maintained by danium in that same repository. The rest of the collection is listed on the danium/lateral-thinking page.
How does SCAMPER compare to other AI Engineering skills?
SCAMPER ranks #2222 by stars among the 2451 AI Engineering skills in this catalog. The most-starred ones next to it are Architecture Decision Records, AI-First Engineering and Agentic OS. DirSkills ranks by the star count of the repository each skill ships in, so that order reflects how popular those repositories are rather than any review of SCAMPER against them. Open each page to compare what they document and how they install.