Coming up with big ideas
Thomas Edison was known as the world's most prolific inventor, being responsible (among many other things) for the phonograph, the motion picture camera and the first commercially practical electric light bulb. He once said, "I find out what the world nee
Recently I had the honour of moderating a session on entrepreneurship for the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in Singapore. It got me to thinking about how to come up with big ideas. Solving consumer problems is a great way to start. Most consumers cannot articulate solutions, but they are superb at telling you what bugs them. A classic example of this dates back to the 1950s when General Motors asked women why they didn’t like to drive cars. The answer: women hated to shift gears, which for cars of the time was much more difficult than today. GM then invented the automatic transmission. Now, no consumer could say “I want an automatic transmission” because they didn’t know what it was. But they could say “I hate to shift manually” and then leave it to the inventor to come up with the solution.
Twenty years ago, did you say, “I want a small device in my pocket that I can use to play music, games and read stuff on, in addition to making phone calls and sending people brief messages”? No, but I bet you complained about being disconnected when you were away from your home.
Listening to customer complaints is a great way to come up with big new ideas. To do this, entrepreneurs need to get out of their comfort zones. Engineers are big examples of this problem. They have a tendency to sit in their offices and come up with hugely (sometimes impractical) schemes that often near no resemblance to what people want. I work with a lot of engineers and I am constantly beseeching them to get out of their offices and into the real world.
Another way to come up with a big idea is to fail. That’s right. Companies spend too much time trying to perfect things when they should be putting ideas into the marketplace and learning. You learn more from your failures than your success. A failure teaches you how to do something different and better. Don’t wait until your new idea is 100 per cent ready – get it to market (or at least in front of some consumers) when it is 70 per cent there. Fail quickly, cheaply and often, and soon you will have a great new idea on your hands.
The natural result of the previous comment is that entrepreneurs need to be willing to change. No idea survives intact exactly as it comes out of someone’s brain. All ideas must mutate if they are to be successful, and the inventor who cannot change is the inventor who will not succeed.
No entrepreneur can succeed on his own. Everyone needs someone to say “Boo! You’re wrong. You need to do this differently.” Everyone needs a mentor (or several). Someone from the outside who can act as a voice of reason, challenge the would-be entrepreneur and force him to think in new ways. I mentor a number of start-ups and, while I don’t pretend to understand their business or their ideas as well as they do, I add value by attacking their pre-conceived notions and getting them to think sideways.
Lastly, no one succeeds without enthusiasm and drive. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.” There are millions of brilliant entrepreneurs out there, with tens of millions of great ideas. The ones who will succeed are the ones who have the passion, drive and focus. Are you one of them?
Eric Rosenkranz is chairman and founder of e.three (www.ethree-asia.com), a strategic advisory helping companies in Southeast Asia develop growth oriented strategies. He can be reached at [email protected].
