How do you create a new Idea?
People tend to believe that having an idea is worthless, because until you have put it in practise it’s not worth a flying monkey.
Yeah, but ideas are what are creating real breakthroughs in the market. I like to believe that real industry leaders grow from a great idea.
Such as
- Rockfeller bought a dirty apple, cleaned it, sold it and bought two dirty apples. Until he paid people to do it for him.
- Google founders thought that most linked sites were worth seeing, such as in research papers.
and some people take the existing and make it different and hopefully better,
- French guy from Netvibes took the idea from Yahoo and added extra customization.
- Colonel Sanders got his fried chicken worldwide known with KFC.
So people have great idea and start-ups who sunk during 2001 do know that a great idea is not so great when the market is not ready. Now it looks like the market is starving for novelty and lots of old pre 2001 ideas could be re-used.
Ok, so the message is “great ideas are great, but not so great”. Huh, I can’t close this post like that. That would be poor quality for a post. (don’t expect me to put links to other websites, here, not that I have thousands of examples).
The gap for an incremental new idea can be filled very fast. You get the idea for a marginal innovation, the gap can be closed in a week worth of development. Getting a breakthrough idea and keeping it for yourself gives you time to perfect it and have massive innovation advantage, that will however be filled very soon.
Having that advantage, you should have had time to advertize for it, create traffic, gain media presence, until you master that segmentation.
Innovation is a short-lived advantage. But it can be amplified through collaboration.
So, you had an idea?
Leverage the knowledge of experts, look at how your innovation gets the best out of state-of-the-art technology. Talk about it with people you have confidence in, great ideas come from different people with a different view of the world.
In the creation process, diversity is the key.
But out there, on the internet, it looks like all the ideas are sleeping as a potential. Some websites are even dedicated to tracking new start-up ideas, and some people could be very successful reproducing the business models they see there (springwise, for example)
So have your daily entrepreneurial fix, get your feeling of the web, try to feel some trends and ask yourself what kind of needs you or the consumer have, that could be filled with a brilliant innovation. Then you have 1/500000000000000000 chance to become the next Bill Gates. (Yeah there are many zeros and you can argue that there are close to 6000000000 on earth, but statistics can be computed in very different ways. I make mines on the spot).