One of the most common questions I get asked is.

How do we come up with great new ideas ?

I know from experience that many entrepreneurs especially new ones can find it challenging to create new ideas of their own. It’s also common to find that the idea generation process itself is one of the hardest parts of any new venture. The thing is you’re already an ideas expert, in fact you do it all the time. Let me quickly demonstrate how you’re already an idea creation machine.

How many times do you voice your opinions about how a service or product could be improved? – Idea creation – Improve the service or product

How often do you say things like “why don’t they do X or Y? ” – Idea creation – Go create the solution yourself or suggest to them how they may implement it themselves (With your help of course.)

“How simple would it be for them just to add X?” – Idea Creation – Add the X factor that’s missing.

I’ve had a great idea to help the X industry – Idea Creation – Go help the X industry to leverage your innovative ideas.

If I was running that company I would make sure that we implemented X – Idea creation – Set up your own company with X implemented or share your ideas with the company in question. You will be amazed at how opportunities can develop from a simple conversation.

Other ways of creating new innovative ideas is to combine two or even three existing and often unrelated ideas, fields or problems together. For example the humble telephone was merged with the photocopier and resulted in the fax, what about matching the telephone with a tape recorder providing the first voicemail capability or even combining a trolley and a suitcase to produce rolling luggage. How about combining a bell and a clock. The alarm clock in it’s time was an innovation. The list of unlikely innovative matches goes on and on.

My point is that every one of us has unique perspectives, views, opinions and ideas about what others are doing and how it could be changed and or improved for the better. If I gave you a problem to solve right now you would likely go away and think about it for a while perhaps you might even carry out some in-depth research. As a result you would return to me in a couple of days time bubbling with ideas and a range of solutions, options and opinions for me to consider. That’s the entrepreneurial mind creating ideas, innovations and improvements right there.

I have identified and developed a number of opportunities over the years by doing nothing more than going to businesses with my ideas about how they could be improving what they do alongside a plan of how they could do it. I have suggested everything from small innovations, different ways of working, to new products and services. I then offer to help them execute and implement those big ideas. I have zero overhead other than my time and importantly I have no requirement to invest my own resources to develop products or services to make a profit, added to which I am completely devoid of risk.

In short I’m an ideas creation agency needing nothing more than a keen eye, basic investigative skills and the imagination and vision to think creatively. This method of helping organisations to evolve and progress is a completely legitimate startup model in itself.

All businesses are mad, crazy and are hungry for new ideas and resolutions to thier most challenging problems and will reward you well for helping them to develop and implement them. Ideas are abundant, they are everywhere you look.

When you’re seeking inspiration for new ideas a good place to start quickly exposing unexplored opportunities is to listen carefully to how people talk around you.

Learning to tune into people’s language is a sure fire way to identify plain sight problems that can be translated into income and profits. Look out for words like.

Painful, constraint, limiting, limited, trouble, time consuming, costly, expensive, slow, complicated, manual, laborious.

These types of words all suggest ripe opportunities for a problem, bottleneck or pain point to be resolved. The real problem as you will soon discover is not in generating, creating or indeed defining good ideas and innovative solutions to problems, that part as I have demonstrated can be simple, cheap and abundant. The one commonality that all successful entrepreneurs share is the ability to act on them.

Execution & Implementation

Developing your awareness and capability to turn those casual “billionaire” thoughts and ideas into real tangible offerings that matter to a defined group of customers should be at the top of your entrepreneurial skills to develop. Learn to master the process of action, execution and implementation well and you will quickly render your competition insignificant.