Creative Strategies to Help Spark Your Next Big Business Idea

Forget The Old Ideas: Unlock Your Creative Potential To Generate New Business Ideas

What is the basic idea behind your business, or behind the product or service you sell? The better your high-level concept is, the easier it will be to grow your business beyond your wildest dreams.

Come Up With New Ideas

Feel free to use the following prompts to help you brainstorm entirely new business, product, and service ideas.

• Frustration: Develop a product or service for something that is frustrating you for which there is currently no great solution.
• Empathy: Put yourself in someone else’s place and consider how you can solve their frustrations and problems. Do some anthropological research or accompany your new clients for a week or two to really feel what their pain points are.
• What will be the next problem that your customers encounter after you help them with your current product or service? Why don’t you come up with something that will solve the next problems as well?
• Ask others to help you and think along with you. Get together to brainstorm and gather ideas. Check out other people’s ideas for your target market.

Combine Existing Ideas

Innovation often arises by combining multiple ideas, sometimes even from different industries.

• Combine two or more ideas from different industries, different countries, or different fields into an entirely new idea.
• Can you take over other parts of the supply chain? For instance, can you also supply the raw materials that you currently purchase to manufacture your product (either physical products or intellectual services)? Or can you take on the work of the middlemen who are after you in the supply chain?
• Can you combine your product or service with another product or service? Think about combining multiple products, multiple services, a service with a product, or a product with a service.

Improve Existing Ideas

Improving existing ideas (your own or someone else’s) may not be the sexiest way to develop new ideas, but it can still add a lot of value for your customers.

• In what direction is the market headed?
• What would be the absolute perfect version of your product or service?
• Can you make an existing product or service much better?
• Can you imitate, improve, and then optimize something that already exists?
• What is your competition doing well, or very well?
• Can you engage customers lower on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, or higher?
• Can you produce something more cheaply?
• Can you deliver an existing product or service more cheaply?
• Can you deliver 80% of the value for 20% of the price? If so, you could build a Price Simplifier as per Richard Koch’s book ‘Simplify.’
• Can you deliver 400% of the value for 120% of the price? If so, you could build a Proposition Simplifier as per Richard Koch’s book ‘Simplify.’
• Can you sell a product or service to a different target audience?
• Can you offer a product or service for totally different use cases?
• Can you create a high-end version of a product or service?
• Can you create a low-end version of a product or service?
• Can you make a product or service bigger, or much bigger?
• Can you make a product or service smaller, or much smaller?
• Can you make a product or service faster, or much faster?
• Can you make a product or service slower, or much slower?
• Can you make a turn-key solution of a product or service?
• Can you make an international version of a product or service?
• Can you make a hyper-localized version of a product or service?
• Can you get someone else to pay for or contribute to a product or service?
• Can you get funding or grants for a product or service? Sponsorship? Tax breaks?
• Can you convert a product or service from an investment to an expense? Or to a subscription? Or vice versa?

Next Up

When you’ve created a list of at least 97 new business ideas, it’s time to develop your own sieve.