Author: Chesney

Idea Accelerator™ is for people who have the fire to innovate whether deciding to start something on their own or re-imagine and re-invent what they do at work. Hotwire your inner circuitry with the ideas and articles you find here.
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Innovation in the media – too little too late?

Tabloid Tycoon
Photo credit: Wikipedia

Visiting the city of Cape Town I was surprised to see its afternoon newspaper transformed into a tabloid after packaging itself for 155 years in broadsheet format.

The maiden editorial shouted “Here’s the future” with loud protestations that the newspaper would not become a frothy “tabloid” but a sober “compact”.

Yet you had to thumb through a feature lead story on the front page and several more feature pages until you came across a few news bites tucked deep inside the middle.

Mainstream, traditional media are in a frenzy to innovate because they are bleeding from online media. Today’s wired generation has a short attention span and is addicted to social media. Even companies are battling to know their shareholders, who buy online and are shareholders for as little as 24 hours.

Why is all this important to small business people? How does it relate to the business? I’ll come to that in a moment. Continue reading “Innovation in the media – too little too late?”

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What if… you never read this blog post?


the google earth view of cbr city
What if you could be seen from Google Earth? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Asking what-if questions can help spark new ideas but you’ve got to ask the right ones. Right ones? Shouldn’t you let rip and come up with anything? Well, you might get ones like this:

What if you stand outside your house and look straight up for at least a year or so – would you appear on Google Earth?

What if you were a hotdog and you were starving, would you eat yourself?

Perhaps these what-ifs could get you thinking with a new perspective. But will they? No they won’t, I hear you say. You’re right. Why is that? Let’s see:

What-if questions help you see the ordinary in a new light, to gain new perspectives. The ideas that result from “what-if” questions are merely seeds that may spark explorations into areas that you have never thought of before. Asking “what-if” questions is unlikely to present you with a practical idea that you can implement right away.

You need to ask further questions that lead to new ideas. The initial “what-if” question is really only a springboard to get your imagination working.

Now, listen up. What comes next may surprise you:

A man ran a small service station and a restaurant outside of town on the main highway to Florida in the United States. He concocted a seasoning for fried chicken. He made a “nice living” until they changed the highway into the Interstate system and the new road bypassed his business. Colonel Harland Sanders was 66 years old, looked at his $105 Social Security cheque and decided what if he used the money to try franchise his chicken recipe. What if he were to take 5 cents from a chicken just as Mr Woolworth had built up his business with his five-and-10-cent stores?

From a simple idea – a what-if question – he launched an international fried chicken franchise that spread worldwide.

What “what-if” questions could you ask yourself?

Here are some that could get you started coming up with your own:

What if you could do something that would make your customers laugh so they feel happy buying from you?

What if you were a product, what product would you be and why?

What if you were a service, whose problems would you solve and how?

What if you were a search word on Google, what would you be?

What if your new product was a woman, what would she tell other women?

What if your competitor created your product, what would they do?

What if you could anticipate the needs of your customers before they even know it?

Try some what-if questions yourself. See how many you can come up with. It’s not as hard as you may think. Write down 20 of them and select your best three. Take these three and see how you can expand them.

For example, the first question may lead to: what if we make customers feel welcome when they make first contact with your business whether it’s off-line or on-line? What if we shipped their products so quickly to them that they felt thrilled by our service? What if we sent customers a thank you note telling them how delighted we are with their purchase and that if they have any questions or problems, they can contact us immediately? And when they do, what if we received their complaints with a smile?

To use what-if questions effectively, you need to be imaginative as possible but remember that they are merely a springboard to further questions that are relevant to your business. They can provide you with valuable insights into how you could launch new products and services and improve those that you already have.

Hooked yet on what-if questions?

Try out some of your own and see where your inspiration leads you.

What if you came up with a hot new business idea for a product or service?

 

Stay inspired.

Chesney Bradshaw

 

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Now new business ideas and tips weekly

A woman typing on a laptop Français : Une femm...
Small business people are hungry for new ideas in this market (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve suddenly realised that I haven’t let you know that www.ideaaccelerator.co.za has gone weekly.

We’ve got so much to talk about and share.

Like new business ideas, tools and tips on how to solve business problems.

The first quarter of this year is nearly over and we’ve covered:  Continue reading “Now new business ideas and tips weekly”

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Break this brainstorming rule and better ideas explode

Brainstorm
Brainstorm (Photo credit: TheImageGroup)

Innovation is about challenging even long-standing, tried and tested or cherished beliefs. But are we really prepared to throw out the window what we know and try something new?

Take brainstorming. For years brainstorming meetings have been held where there are grave warnings that no criticism is allowed. The no-criticism rule has been sacrosanct to encourage participants to open up and offer their ideas in a friendly atmosphere.

Well, researchers have turned this long-held belief on its head. They’ve introduced debate and criticism into experimental groups and found that debate provides unpredictability that fosters or produces more and better quality ideas. Continue reading “Break this brainstorming rule and better ideas explode”

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Do all these idea generation techniques really work?

You’ve got every right to be skeptical.

Here’s why:

Every day ordinary people come up with ideas. They fix things in their homes, they find ways to reduce their expenses and they get ideas to make delicious suppers.

At work they find new ways to do their work more effectively, write e-mails and proposals and figure out clever methods to cut costs.

Now, why would they want techniques and methods to generate ideas? Continue reading “Do all these idea generation techniques really work?”

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Four things you absolutely must know when buying online

Who can you trust when buying products or services online?

Sorry to sound cynical but there’s a reason:

As a buyer or consumer these days even off-line you have to be ultra careful. For example, take your credit card or ATM card. You have to watch out that no one sees your three-digit number at the back of your credit card or your pin code. In the wrong hands, you can lose a lot of money. So many people get caught. Continue reading “Four things you absolutely must know when buying online”

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One sure way to beat this fire walk

Aren’t you just tired with people who make statements about small businesses but are far removed from the trenches of real business?

Politicians make yada yada in the media about supporting small business.

Academics chirp in on how jobs should be created by small business.

Conferences and summits with hefty admission fees are held on the state of small business where there’s much dreary theory but little hands-on practical advice. Continue reading “One sure way to beat this fire walk”

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It took 5,000 ideas to take this product to market

James Dyson came up with an idea for a bagless vacuum cleaner — inspired by an industrial cyclone at a timber mill — in the late 1960s.

After five years of testing and more than 5,000 “mistakes”, or prototypes as engineers call them, his vacuum cleaner concept was ready to take to market.

But all the big brand manufacturers slammed doors in his face.

Why?

Their business model was selling vacuum cleaners and bags — which made them lots of money.

He had to eventually launch his vacuum cleaner himself – in 1993.

He became a billionaire.

It’s hard not to admire this guy. Think of the many rejections he had to face. Imagine having to deal with all the people who must have thought he was crazy.

“What’s important is that I didn’t stop at the first failure, the 50th, or the 5,000th,” he wrote in a news magazine. “I never will.”

Such persistence is incredible. How many times have we come up with promising ideas and keep working on them for years?

In my case I had an idea for a website similar to www.ideaaccelerator.co.za that I started in 2005 for entrepreneurs. But I packed in it after a year because of competing interests.

It was only in 2010 that I decided to start a new blog on the easier WordPress platform. Keeping the momentum for the first year was difficult but now it has taken on a life of its own.

Persistence, someone said, is to the character of people as carbon is to steel. It’s hard to define but so essential for bringing a product or service to life.

How often do we have ideas and just give up at the first obstacle? How far would you go in pursuing your idea for a product or service? Would you keep at your idea for several decades until you finally brought it to market? Could you keep going, refining your idea after 5,000 mistakes?

Look at it this way, each one of Dyson’s 5,000 mistakes actually involved coming up with a new idea each time. It’s a myth that innovation is one single event or flash of inspiration. You sometimes need to build ideas upon ideas as you refine your product or service for the market place.

It’s ironic that Dyson was forced to sue one of the companies that had rejected his design years back. Success leads to copycats.

Want to come up with and develop ideas of your own?

Tune into www.ideaaccelerator.co.za for ideas and articles.

Stay inspired

Chesney Bradshaw

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Who ever heard such nonsense about negotiation?

Whether you run a small retail or manufacturing business, a service outfit or act as a solo consultancy, you must have at one time or another been personally involved in some difficult negotiation that tested your mental powers to the limit.

As you wracked your brain for solutions, thought up ways to secure the best deal for yourself and visualised solutions to protect your interests, it’s hard to argue that your imagination wasn’t being stretched.

I came across some research the other day about creativity not really playing a significant role in negotiation. I’m not sure I even understand these academics but in my experience and observing other business people locked in negotiation I’m absolutely convinced that creativity does make a difference in negotiation.

Before we see how creativity influences negotiation, let’s look at what negotiation means. In the real world, all the academic definitions of negotiation don’t make much sense. What’s more grounded in reality is that negotiation is really about finding some sort of agreement that is mutually acceptable. It might require compromise. But if you don’t like the envisaged outcome you can always say no and walk away.

Negotiation is important to all of us because we do it all the time. At home, at work, at play.

I recently participated in several role playing negotiations. What I was struck by was that the negotiations deadlocked every time for these reasons: The negotiation team members did not creatively imagine their opponents’ world. They did not fully understand the world of their customer or seller and therefore could not make a fully imaginative assessment of their needs, wants and desires. With more creative thinking, viewing the problem from different perspectives, they could have immersed themselves more fully in their customer’s world.

The other area where they could have used more creativity was to brainstorm and invent more options for mutual gain. And in instances where there was no hope for this, they could have walked away from the deal.

Making conditional proposals, so the other side can’t get what they want from you without you getting what you want from them in return, requires creativity. So does setting the agenda or order of business. Deciding what issues to discuss first and which ones to deal with later is a very creative act especially when the stakes are high.

These are just a few instances of creativity in negotiations. In these economic times it is crucial that you negotiate the best deal with your customers, suppliers and other business people.

Leaving money on the table doesn’t only leave a bad taste in your mouth, it also hurts your bottom line.

 

Stay inspired

Chesney Bradshaw