“Ideas you have in the shower are rarely what the market wants.” – Quote from a discussion on entrepreneurs
Should those ideas that pop into your head while in the shower, driving to work in the morning or listening to your favourite music on your iPod be so easily dismissed as the quote implies?
The answer is probably yes if you decide to take your white-hot idea from the shower straight to a cut-throat market even if it’s some unlikely tucked away niche.
Ideas, whether from the shower or blasted out of idea generation sessions are often merely the fragile and precious seeds that begin the idea development process. Ideas need to germinate and grow after exploration and refinement.
Some entrepreneurs like James Dyson tweak their original ideas until they appeal to the needs, wants and desires of the market. Dyson refined his first concept for a bagless vacuum cleaner 5,000 times before commercialising it.
The street-tough small business owner, kitchen-table entrepreneur or aspirant sideline business adventurer is unlikely to go through such an excruciating process as Dyson did over several years. But they’d still need to subject their original idea to vigorous evaluation and testing to avoid blind spots.
An idea is really an initial spark inspired by your unconscious that has most likely linked two previously unconnected thoughts. Innovation is what happens after you come up with your idea. Innovation involves investing something that can create economic value in the market.
Developing your idea to take advantage of a market opportunity needs a commercialisation plan or innovation roadmap.
In this economy, where hundreds of thousands of small businesses have closed over the past five years and fewer people trying to start their own businesses, the need for a proven easy-to-implement assessment process for new business ideas is a no brainer.
We’re dedicated to advising business people — small business owners, kitchen table entrepreneurs and sideline business start-ups – to come up with new business ideas, evaluate and commercialise them without the mumbo jumbo.
We’ll offer our proven innovation roadmap in our next blog post on tools to take your awesome shower idea and give it jaw-dropping power to crank out the moolah. Better check it out or your new business idea could mislead you and make you invest too much time and money, turning your life into a bad horror flick.
Stay inspired
Chesney Bradshaw
