The hardest part about beginning a startup company is coming up with an idea that not only fills an important void, but that no one else has already come upRead More
The post 3 Super Solid Ways to Create New Business Ideas appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>The hardest part about beginning a startup company is coming up with an idea that not only fills an important void, but that no one else has already come up with. It is exceedingly likely that the first idea you come up with will not be a success. As such, it is imperative to not let yourself become discouraged by initial disappointments and to keep on pushing.
These popular techniques will go a long way towards helping you create new business ideas:
The entrepreneur who successfully creates a new business and can withstand the test of time is the one who is able to peer into their crystal ball and predict the trends of the future. While this process does require just a smidgen of good luck, a great entrepreneur knows that luck is merely the residue of skill and hard work. Luck does not come to those who park themselves on the couch and wait for it to come along, it happens to those who get up, get out there and work for it.
A top notch idea for a business is one that is ahead of the curve and anticipates changes in the landscape. The person who is monitoring current trends instead of future trends is going to come up with ideas that are instantly outdated. A decent entrepreneur looks at what is going on now and thinks of a way to fit in with the current landscape.
On the other hand, a great entrepreneur thinks about the future and wonders how they can create the next big thing, rather than an inferior knockoff version of the current big thing. Monitoring the current trends in the business world can provide some help when it comes to developing new ideas, but you have to consider the amount of time it takes to start a new business.
An idea that seems fresh in the moment is often past its sell by date when you are finally able to get down to brass tacks and start the process of opening a business. Consider the future and what place your product will hold in that future.
I am willing to bet that there are many things in your everyday life that drive you crazy. One of my personal favorite ways to create new business ideas is by taking the time to consider the things about life that annoy you the most. If you hone in on the things that “piss you off,” you will be able to brainstorm real solutions to everyday problems. If you are are the type of person that feels like you have to “do things on your own,” this task brainstorming technique will come naturally to you. As I’ve come to learn from many authors on innovation, the best entrepreneurs are those who find out about what we lack most and discover a new way to provide the public with the needed item.
Invention is not a must in these scenarios, but it can help you to develop new ideas. Brainstorming about products that every human being would want, but have yet to be created is a great way to amplify the creative process and ensure that you remain ahead of the curve at all times.
Speak to people you know, as well. There are many instances where the things that annoy you and frustrate you will also annoy and frustrate them. Canvasing close friends and family can also provide you with important information about frustrations that they are having that you had failed to consider.
Consult with members of the opposite sex and ask them about their daily frustrations. A company that is able to consider a variety of concerns from various walks of life is one that will prosper in the long term. Having a narrow focus leads to a lack of creativity and should be avoided.
Most people prefer to avoid frustrating moments at all costs, but those who can train their mind to look deeper can find valuable business ideas that no one else has considered.
Just because you cannot create new business idea does not mean that you should give up on your entrepreneurial dreams. Some of the best and brightest entrepreneurs are those who analyzed the current marketplace, discovered inefficiencies that could easily be corrected and decided to do something about it.
This strategy is helpful for entrepreneurs who are struggling to come up with ideas of their own. Perhaps you are someone who enjoys a certain product, but finds it to be overpriced. This is your opportunity to research the product you enjoy and see if any changes can be made during any part of the process that can have a positive effect on the pricing structure.
Or, maybe you can take a closer look at what the major players in your desired niche are doing wrong. A company does not have to be the same size as the big boys to successfully compete with them. The playing field has never been more level and a person can learn a lot from what the major business in their field are doing wrong.
There are typically enough gaps in the industry that you seek to join that can be easily exploited. Perhaps there is a service that a major company should be offering that they have not thought of. By using this as your starting point, you can start a business that already has built in clientele.
Some larger businesses are no longer in the business of innovation, they are more focused on maintaining their current piece of the pie. If so, this also provides an opportunity to come up with an idea that takes a product that is already available to the next level.
The Dream Cafe by Geoff Crook
Seeing What Others Don’t by Gary Klein
The Myths of Creativity by David Burkus
One Simple Idea by Stephen Key
A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Sell Your Ideas With or Without a Patent according to Stephen Key: Introduction In this episode bestselling author Stephen Key reveals hisRead More
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]]>In this episode bestselling author Stephen Key reveals his insights on his book, Sell Your Ideas With or Without a Patent, where he shares his secrets to making profits of product ideas.
In his book Key reveals many stories, tactics, and tips on how to effectively protect an invention idea in order to earn royalties from it in the future. The goal of the book is to teach you how to fill out a patent application for the USPTO, save large amounts of money on the legal expenses that come with patenting, find an excellent patent attorney, and win over a licensing contract.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who have innovative mindsets and want to know the inside secrets of making money off new inventions with or without patents.
A book like this has never been written anywhere, ever because it’s from the business perspective, not the legal perspective.
This book is written in such a way that if you have a simple idea you can read a few chapters and be ready to start immediately. And then I go in from a different perspective if you have a big idea and show you what exactly you need to do.
You can do this and do it with confidence!
This book is for the listeners that have ideas but not sure what to do with it in fear that someone else might take it. If you dig into this book you will learn to understand how to use the tools provided and they are very inexpensive but you’ll learn how to write this information down that has value in that perceived ownership. This book is written in such a way that it gives you ownership.
You will find throughout this book that it is a very technical book but it’s very easy to read and understand. I took a topic that was complicated and
I brought it down to a level that anybody can understand and be able to use these tools that are provided for us. So this book strips away the fear, it shows you how to take a small idea for $65 and have that perceived ownership. It talks about how to structure a licensing agreement even if you don’t have any ownership. It’s time for us to take advantage of our size, to be quick, to be small, to be smart, and take these tools that the USPTO provide anyone in the world, to play the largest game in the world. But you have to understand how to leverage those tools and that’s why this book is very different.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 09:11
“There is no such thing as ownership, it’s only perceived ownership.” – Stephen Key
I have been bringing my simple ideas to market and collecting royalties for each and every one that is sold. I am here to show you how to save money and protect those ideas when you bring them to market.
A few years ago I was in federal court suing a small toy company Legos which took three years and through that whole process I realized that we never really own anything, even if we have patents. We have this fear that we have to have patents to go forward with our ideas and that’s just not true. This book was written from a business perspective about how to take our ideas, bring them to market, and use the tools from the USPTO to our advantage.
The Obstacle Is The Way by Ryan Holiday
Buy Sell Your Ideas With or Without a Patent by Stephen Key on Amazon today
Visit InventRight.com to learn more about Stephen, his books, and YouTube channel
Visit Entrepreneur.com and Inc.com to read more articles by Stephen Key
Follow Stephen Key on Facebook and Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
One Simple Idea by Stephen Key
The Dream Cafe by Geoff Crook
The Maker Movement Manifesto by Mark Hatch
Related advice:
5 Lessons Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Stephen Key
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Dream Cafe according to Geoff Crook: Introduction In this episode Geoff Crook reveals all his insights on his book, The DreamRead More
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]]>In this episode Geoff Crook reveals all his insights on his book, The Dream Cafe, where he provides a guide for harnessing creativity and developing a brand designed to disrupt any market.
In his book Crook and co-author Duncan Bruce developed a fresh, innovative approach that is used by major businesses and is designed to product radical innovation that leads to unpredictable outcomes. The goal of the book is to show you how to transform any big business idea into a market disruptor, develop a competitive advantage by taking risks, and effectively implement massive innovation.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who possess a very creative mindset and need a practical guide for turning fresh ideas into highly profitable business ventures that will redefine any market.
The Dream Cafe identifies a crucial president called the avant-garde. Those people who met together in cafes or other venues and people who came from all kinds of disciplines but had in common the passion for challenging convention and changing the world. It was those people that invented the future. And so basically The Dream Cafe takes the position that in the world of uncertainty it really helps if you could look back to a president of people who learned how to do it well and managed to do it systematically across 150 years.
This book is written to allow people to step in and step out of.
Trust your instinct, believe in the potential of serendipity, and recognize that chaos creates opportunity.
If you take the argument that chaos is an opportunity rather than a threat then essentially what you need to come to terms with are some of the qualities which are inherent in the way in which the avant-garde think about the world. Moving in to the notion that dreaming is important and anytime you look at any discipline that created some kind of major disruptive innovation in the world it’s a mystery that kind of fuels you. From there you can grab hold of that stuff and shape it into something that allows you to invent the future. The notion of experimentation has to be a permanent state of being for any competitive business and the book suggest that experimentation is absolute embracing the right to fail. It understands that failure should be part of the innovation process. Other important areas are the idea of habitat and the multisensory space. Multisensory space is the idea that we are only at this threshold of realizing and capitalizing on how extraordinary we are as humans. I suggest that you shouldn’t even think about trying to disrupt this world until you can disrupt yourself.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 06:59
“I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.” – Marcel Duchamp
I am passionate about creativity and absolutely committed to the idea that disruption allows you to create better futures. I worked at Central Saint Martin’s college as a director of imagination and application and created a master’s program called Applied Imagination which broke just about every rule in education. I’ve done a lot of freelancing in the branding/marketing area and that’s where I got to meet Duncan who I then collaborated with on creating The Dream Cafe.
Frustration was the primary inspiration. It was frustration that the majority of businesses was confronting the context of market unpredictability by investing in trained insight rather than innovation and was simply failing to notice the difference.
Experience and Nature by John Dewey
Buy The Dream Cafe by Geoff Crook on Amazon today
Visit TheDreamCafe.eu.com to learn more about the book
Follow Geoff Crook on LinkedIn
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
The Innovator’s Method by Nathan Furr
The Business Idea Factory by Andrii Sedniev
Disruption by Design by Paul Paetz
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Steps To Promote Innovation At The Workplace
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Rhythm according to Micah Yost: Introduction In this episode Micah Yost takes a deep dive into his book, Rhythm where he addressesRead More
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]]>In this episode Micah Yost takes a deep dive into his book, Rhythm where he addresses the problem when entrepreneurs know they need to be creative, but essentially lack the ability.
In his book, Yost provides you with a field guide for solving this problem with a purpose to boost your creative confidence with a solid and approachable guideline to become consistently effective at innovation.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who lack the ability to generate ideas or have ideas they have yet seen to succeed.
My book is only about 50 pages long and I did that very intentionally because I felt like if I use the right words and communicated with brevity I could get this point across in 50 pages.
My hope is that this would be a book that you read straight through front to back and you keep with you as a reference. At the end of each chapter I have five actions points to help you make something and do something with this book.
It’s rhythm – great things happen when you get into a rhythm and that’s the core of the book.
The whole book rally’s around the equation of influence + rhythm x action = creative. I define creative as someone who consistently executes ideas and this equation is what gets us there.
I start by talking about influences and I really take people through the idea that our ideas happen way before we get to the white board. What influences us in our past and during our work is what really brings us to our ideas. I write a lot about my grandfather who is a poet and philosopher who lives in a small town and he walks the alleys everyday with his notebook and pencil and that’s where all his poetry comes out of. I ask the question of how different those poems would be instead of walking the alleys of small town America but instead he was walking the cities of Chicago. His poetry would be so much different based on that change in influence and it’s the same for us. The ideas that we are going to have are going to be significantly different depending on the influences in our life. We need to think about what is influencing us and bringing about our ideas.
I move on to talk a little bit about this idea of rhythm and how important it is that it became the title of the book. I talk about this idea of routine, consistently doing the same things and I say that doing the same things will bring the same results. In the book I walk through some of the most significant creatives and innovators in history and the routine that each of them had that helped them bring about their ideas.
I finish up the book talking about action. Action is the wild card, it’s the multiplier. Even poor ideas can become great if we become really good at execution. We walk through this idea that great innovators have this bias towards moving things forward and bringing things to light. Honestly, ideas are worthless by themselves and without really good action. To close the book I walk through specific examples of looking at people and their innovations and how this looked and worked for them.
“Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition,” – W.H. Auden
I live right in the middle of the country in Omaha Nebraska and work with an awesome group of creatives at a company called Elevate where we do digital brand and design. My undergrad is in the arts and my graduate degree is in business. I’ve spent the past decade working right at that intersection of creativity, innovation and business.
I was on an airplane a couple months back flying into Tennessee to speak at a conference called Everywhere Else. I was planning on talking about something else but I have a rhythm of my own of going back and scrubbing my notes. I came upon a question of what would it look like to really make creativity and innovation consistently executable and out of that came an equation that I write about in the book and it turned into the talk that I gave during the conference. It spurred a lot of questions and conversation at the conference so I felt like I wanted to take it further and try to address that issue.
Good to Great by Jim Collins
Show Your Work by Austin Kleon
Buy Rhythm by Micah Yost on Amazon today
Visit MicahYost.com to learn more about Micah and his blog
Follow Micah Yost on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Invent, Reinvent, Thrive by Lloyd Shefsky | The Innovator’s Method by Nathan Furr | The Road to Reinvention by Josh Linkner
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Steps to Promote Innovation in the Workplace
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>5 Steps to Promote Innovation in the Workplace Is innovation essential for your start-up? The answer is short and simple – YES! And it’s not just in the product thatRead More
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]]>5 Steps to Promote Innovation in the Workplace
Is innovation essential for your start-up? The answer is short and simple – YES! And it’s not just in the product that you need to innovate; you need to promote innovation in the workplace. And this is only possible if you have the right attitude.
How do you promote innovation in the workplace? Before you take the steps to attain this goal, you need to understand the basic difference between creativity and innovation. Creativity involves ideas while innovation implies the implementation of these ideas.
Let’s take a look at the steps you need to take to promote innovation at the workplace.
Step 1: Cultivate the right attitude. If your employees are just too afraid to speak up in front of you, they won’t bother to share their ideas with you. Cultivate the right attitude; not that of a ‘boss’, but that of a ‘leader’.
Make sure your employees look up to you, and feel free to discuss whatever innovations they think will do good to the organization. It will open the floodgates of ideas and approaches; and your business will benefit from their endeavors.
Step 2: Hire the right people. Individuals who love what they do and look forward to work are the best choices. Hire them. Look for passionate, focused people who believe in dreams and have the capability to achieve them too.
Also, keep in mind that your team members share the same vision about the organization, the product and the service. This will align their goals with yours and the team will work together as a single unit instead of an assortment of individual units.
Step 3: Re-imagine workplace environment. Today’s workplaces are maddening – what with the continuous emails, calls, conferences. Make sure the work environment is relaxed and cheerful. It will ensure the best from every team member.
Rethink the conventional pattern; a 9 to 5 routine in an office with whitewashed walls may not be the best place for innovative thoughts. A flexible approach works out to be a better option. Consider how to get the best from your entire team.
Step 4: Encourage employees. Put together a team of individuals with different capabilities, approaches and backgrounds. And welcome solutions to innovate sectors of the organization. It need not be about the innovation of the product only.
Allocate time for brainstorming sessions and urge people to be part of them. Training sessions to learn innovation techniques such as mind-mapping or lateral thinking may also prove to be advantageous for the employees at your organization.
Step 5: Reward innovation. Just persuading people to be innovative won’t do; you need to offer an incentive for them to do it on their own accord. An awards scheme to recognize the innovation in your employees can be an ideal way to do it.
It is not the reward but the recognition that matters. And also keep in mind that you need to enhance your tolerance levels to put up with mistakes. Give people the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. Don’t put off innovations, even if the ideas don’t always work out.
With a little effort, you will be able to create a work environment that promotes innovation.
Successful businesses don’t depend on a handful of people to come up with improvements. Instead, they create an environment conducive to the promotion of innovation. And this results in their success – not only in their products or services, but in every aspect.
Encouragement and empowerment of employees is important to attain this goal. And you need to have the right approach to make it real. Focus on how your employees can be at their best; and they will do their best for the organization too.
For a great book in reference, we recommend Ken Tencer’s piece entitled “Cause A Disturbance.”
Listen to my interview with Ken Tencer as we take a deeper look inside his book >>> LISTEN NOW
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