Introduction: Generating Great Ideas – Tips from Ordinary People
Often it is difficult for you to digest all the information in the interviews, so I decided that for today and tomorrow I’d extract specific bits of responses from a few interviews. Today we’ll focus on generating great ideas. What process do you use to generate ideas? Can you blend your process with any of the ones mentioned below? The interviews are meant for both of us to learn from them.
Avil Beckford: What process do you use to generate great ideas?
Annemie Ress: I don’t have a specific process. Most often when I’m not thinking is when ideas come to me. I will consciously try not to think about a challenge or a solution that I’m facing but switch to doing something creative or relaxing, and that’s when the best ideas come.
Carol McManus: I will give two answers to that because it comes up in two forms. I come up with a lot of ideas just when I’m in my own head. That could be when I’m listening to music, taking a walk or driving in the car. I let my mind wander, go, and think creatively. When I’m doing some of these crafty things I find I’m also creative and come up with great ideas. But having said that, the development and the richness of those ideas, come to fruition when I bring people into the conversation. I love to brainstorm and debate with people. I want them to challenge me and take the seed of an idea and help me improve it because I know I can’t do it all by myself. I’m very much an open book, so it’s letting me be creative in my own head, and then testing the market, but really using other people’s attitudes and experiences and impressions so that you can improve on what you thought was a really good idea to begin with. It always gets better.
Evan Carmichael: I find a lot of my best ideas come when I’m moving around, so not just sitting down in a chair head buried deep in work. You have to allow time for creativity and flexibility. I now walk to work and that’s something that I changed around in the past year where I moved closer to work. I get a lot of ideas on that walk that helps me to clear my mind and also think about what’s happening. Sometimes in the mornings I’ll do a quick meditation and that gives me ideas as well. And also just being active, doing salsa dancing gives me ideas as well as having dinner with my wife. I get the best ideas when I’m not working on my business. If you’re going crazy hammering out hours and burning yourself out you probably won’t get any great, new ideas. You have to make sure that you have that relaxed time to be able to generate some of those ideas.
Jeanne-Marie Robillard: I believe we come to better decisions and better results when we do things in a group. Pulling a team together and brainstorming, sending a mass email out to those in your network who have a common experience with what you’re struggling with, reaching out for ideas and bringing those ideas together. I also use the Internet quite extensively and subscribe to many different chats and blogs.
Nathon Gunn: I steal them! Maybe that’s one of the few times you hear people say something like that but it’s an honest part of creating ideas. I don’t think many things come from absolutely nowhere. I think you have to be an absorber of great ideas to put things together in new ways. I work with a big team of creative, brilliant people so we get together as a group and generate great ideas together. We bounce ideas off each other. Moses Znaimer, my old boss, used to sign his name to various TV shows that he did, and that’s fine, but along with those signatures was a long list of credits for the other people who worked on those products.
When you watch the end of a TV show you see those names and it’s a collaborative process. I think it’s a big part of generating great ideas, since you’ve asked, I have to tell you one of the funniest ways that I’ve generated great ideas – when we have creative brainstorming sessions, I notice I will hear a really good idea from somebody and I would repeat it back to the person I heard it from, and they will laugh and say, “You misheard me totally, that’s not the idea? It’s this other idea.” And often enough, the idea I misheard is a really good idea so sometimes bad hearing helps us to generate great ideas.