Introduction to my book, “Secrets of Generating Ideas For Profit: how to quickly and easily get viable business ideas”, by Chesney Bradshaw, published by Bell & Cray Business Books:
All it takes to make a million is to come up with a new idea for a product or service and you’ve got it made. A fantasy? Dream? A reality?
Small businesses, start-ups and solo entrepreneurs are coming up with new products and services all the time – just open up your business weekly or business section of your newspaper and you’ll see it. Or, go look around at shopping malls and see the number of new products that have been launched by small companies.
In just the past week I’ve seen a deck of playing cards that have been formed to make up a city guide – on the one side are the top tourist attractions in the city and on the other side is a game that children can play.
A store that is dedicated solely to selling coffee and coffee appliances has just opened up in a shopping centre – segmentation is increasingly getting down to a micro level.
A repair shop for fixing BlackBerry smartphones has started in several major cities and provides quotations online and via the telephone.
Just take a look at SpringWise, the website that delivers three or new product and service ideas daily, to get a quick idea of how rapidly new products and services are being introduced into the market despite the global economic recession.
Coming up with ideas isn’t something that can be reduced to a formula, turned into a formal structured process or be simplified into fixed rules. Nor can you just copy or imitate the methods of another company and expect fixed results.
What then is a breakthrough idea? What is a big idea?
Usually the term breakthrough idea or big idea refers to an idea that may not necessarily be unique but that is a game changer and has significant or large impacts.
When we think of products, what springs to mind are things like the iPhone, the worldwide web and Facebook. In services we could think of overnight delivery through couriers, Macdonald’s promise to serve you in under five minutes, and even online ordering. These may be considered breakthroughs in the widest sense of the word.
But a breakthrough could also be a personal breakthrough – you could break through your present circumstances through coming up with a new business idea for a product or service that may provide you with a sideline income, create a new career for yourself or as a young person create a job for yourself where you have continually had doors shut in your face.
How do you find your big idea?
All these are worthy of being termed breakthroughs. How do you find your big idea? Is there a way to come up with breakthrough ideas?
The Internet has volumes on how to come up with breakthrough ideas but is this a myth being perpetuated by the thousands of blogs on the Internet?
A breakthrough or big idea is not just something that comes to you instantly or can be conjured up like magic through seven simple steps.
Ideas can pop up into your mind from hobbies, your passion, your working experience, observation, listening, and a deliberate focus on idea generation techniques. You may also find your inspiration from a desperate frustration with existing products and services and decide that you want to come up with something far better than is on the market.
You can vastly increase your odds of coming up with a new business idea through a concentrated and focused effort on ideas. It’s very much like the piano player, the guitarist or the chess player who devotes hundreds of hours to their passion and then suddenly improves and becomes good at what they do.
Ways to accelerate ideas
The fastest way to come up with ideas is to use proven idea-generation techniques and methods that have worked for decades in many fields including business, the arts and health. By training your mind to look for ideas, to become aware of the opportunities and possibilities in your surroundings combined with the use of idea-generation tools, will enable you to generate ideas that you never thought you were capable of.
Here’s why you will have time to learn how to generate ideas: this book takes you through the main things you need to know about idea generation quickly. When you make idea-generation a part of your daily life you only need to devote a few minutes daily to get an idea. You will be amazed at the ideas you come up with. The techniques will only take you about 10 minutes at a time or for slightly longer techniques you might only need one hour – that’s all.
Even if you tried idea generation before and it hasn’t worked for you, the methods and approach in this book will guarantee that you will come up with great ideas. If you don’t, then take this book and throw it away. I have used these methods one-on-one with entrepreneur business people, I have coached people on these techniques for idea generation and I have used them myself for several breakthrough ideas. Let me give you an example:
I was reading a lot of books on creativity. I thought about all the years I’ve been interested in creativity, idea-generation and innovation. I was amazed how idea-generation had helped me enormously in my life.
“Why not start a blog on the subject?” I asked myself. Within weeks ideaaccelerator.co.za was launched. And work began on a book which you are reading. Another book is in the pipeline.
I know what it feels like to be out there on your own with no support and only your imagination, wits and ideas to help you. I’d just lost my job in the middle of a recession during a time of great political upheaval in the country where I live. In a period of about two months I developed a chilli sauce, started a new distributorship from a passion I had for collecting writing instruments at the time, sold a personal safety product through a number of small distributors and sold food products in bulk to cash customers. All these ideas were generated in a time of personal crisis. Dire circumstances can get your imagination working.
This book has been written from the guts and glory of many years of hard knocks, trial and error, personal experimentation, observation of others, working in a variety of fields and continuing with the faith and belief and passion that with no capital but the wealth inside people’s heads, they can come up with ideas and refine them and with determination bring them to reality or materialise them.
There isn’t another book written on the subject like this because my experience is completely different to everyone else’s. The information that you get here has not been developed in some classroom, laboratory or workshop – it comes from the streets, from selling fish on the quay of Kalk Bay, diving for diamonds in the desert, working in townships where in humble circumstances people with an idea and determination produce furniture better than you can then you can get at top department stores, and working with entrepreneurs some of them for many years who I consider to be the best at their game, self-made innovators.
One thing I can guarantee you – you won’t produce promising ideas just by reading this e-book. You need to really understand the information and ideas in this book. If you don’t really get it on the first time, read it again. If you are very few people who strongly desire to succeed, read books and it feels 10 times before they really understand and put their work into action. Rather do that than read 10 books on the same subject – understand one well. You won’t produce ideas just by reading this book. But you will if you take the information, tools and techniques to heart and put them into action. Then your ideas will flow like a veritable river.
From idea to product or service
I’ve been careful in the section on implementation to give you the best information in my experience and that I can find using many resources including the best business people I know, to evaluate your new ideas so strongly that they stand a far better chance of succeeding.
Your ideas will cost you money when you want to implement them. But I show you short-cuts, ways how to reduce your investment cost to a bare minimum and explain how to take the risk out of implementing your new idea through some specific methods that you can use.
Here’s why you should read this book now, as quickly as you can and absorb its ideas and put them into practice. You never know when you may need a new idea in a hurry. You never know what can happen at the next turn in your life.
You wouldn’t be reading this book if you didn’t believe you had ideas of your own but may have been too afraid to put them into practice. Learn from this book how to refine your idea, test it and implement it.
Opportunities are waiting for you. So many ideas have been implemented every day as we speak. How much longer are you going to wait?
This book is not for anyone who thinks that they can do idea-generation without any work at all, read this book and just dream about it.
The rewards are many: you will find satisfaction in doing something that you believe in, you will be rewarded and feel great when your idea materialises into a product or service and you make actual money from it – possibly building a lifetime of income, never having to rely on anyone else anymore in your life time – and enjoying the recognition you deserve.
Stay inspired
Chesney Bradshaw
