Tag: breakthrough ideas

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Information is a commodity, specialised knowledge is valuable

liquid paper (A bottle correction fluid), pict...
Liquid paper (A bottle correction fluid), picture and eraser – Nakhon Sawan, Thailand (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of the small businesses I was trying to get up and running some years back gave me a lot of headaches. A big challenge was getting the distribution right. Without distribution channels, the business could not get off the ground. Another issue was trying to attract a specialised staff person but with the small business not having any track record.

These are the kind of issues that the person who is starting something from scratch often confronts. Other issues could involve product prototyping and estimating market demand. These are not easy to issues to solve especially when you are a small business person operating on a shoestring budget with your resources only being yourself and meagre savings. Continue reading “Information is a commodity, specialised knowledge is valuable”

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Why shun creativity when it can help you see your business idea more clearly?

(Copyright © 2015 by Chesney Bradshaw, all rights reserved)
(Copyright © 2015 by Chesney Bradshaw, all rights reserved)

Creativity often gets a bad rap when it comes to business because people see being creative as wild, chaotic and risky. These are the stereotypes that come with not understanding the role of creativity in taking an idea from a mere thought or notion to a fully realised product, service or small enterprise.

I came across a quote from the famous drawing teacher Betty Edwards in her “The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, “We often describe creative intelligence as “the ability to see things clearly”. When starting out with a new business idea that has potential, you can only get to see whether it’s going to be viable when you learn to see it better with greater precision and fine discrimination. What this means is that creative intelligence is actually the ability to perceive things with greater clarity. Continue reading “Why shun creativity when it can help you see your business idea more clearly?”

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The power of innovation – accelerated thinking

Beach from East London, RSA Français : rivage ...
Beach from East London (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An East London father was at the beach when his son was stung by a bluebottle. The father tried several common but ineffective traditional remedies to relieve the sting. He did research afterwards. Solution? The enzyme from pawpaw. The father now sells his product for bluebottle and insect stings.

People need to come up with new ideas to respond to challenges, problems and difficulties they are facing. They also may be looking for opportunities to turn their ideas into new products and services. But they just can’t make a personal breakthrough. They rack their brains but still nothing comes. Continue reading “The power of innovation – accelerated thinking”

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Where do ideas for new products and services come from?

English: Marske beach Gentleman metal detectin...
English: Marske beach Gentleman metal detecting on the sands. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One evening when we were down at the coast we went into the sea at Fish Hoek beach corner and saw a couple with a metal detector combing the beach. When we came out of the water, had a shower under fresh water, walked back to our sitting place on Jaggers’ Walk where we dried ourselves. Next to us, sitting alongside on a bench was the couple who had the metal detector device. They got talking to us and we found out a whole lot of interesting things about metal detecting on the beach. They had started the hobby when they had been in the UK, saw one of their family members over there doing it and got bitten by the metal detecting bug. Continue reading “Where do ideas for new products and services come from?”

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Better to start developing your new business idea soon as possible than wait for the perfect thing

Food
Food (Photo credits: PB Teen)

The glossy business magazines will feature entrepreneurs who got their promising business ideas up and running in six months. These are the exceptions or what researchers call outliers. It leads you to believe that starting something from scratch can be done in record time and that instant success is forthcoming. What about all the other would-be entrepreneurs who take far longer to come up with a new business idea and even longer to get it off the ground?

The reality is that starting something from scratch, something of your own, something from a promising business idea, takes three times the duration to get it off the ground and will probably cost twice as much as the business gurus would leaf you to believe. It’s far better to have a realistic sense of what to expect when trying to develop something of your own than live in cloud cuckoo land expecting overnight success. One Internet business, for example, took 10 years before it became commercially viable, gaining enough traction to start getting noticed by Internet users. Continue reading “Better to start developing your new business idea soon as possible than wait for the perfect thing”

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After enduring much trauma, this small business owner finally made a personal breakthrough

BOOK 2 FLAT jpg croppedI was talking to John, a small business owner a few weeks ago. He told me how desperate he had been for a personal breakthrough in his life.

He ran a factory with his brother but it was over when the Asian imports destroyed their market. He moved cities and thought that he could trade similar products, importing them from different markets overseas. On one of these shipments, a full container load, which he had financed himself, was hit by a sudden drop in the volatile local currency. He had not taken forward cover on the currency. He was devastated.

John is not a quitter. Over the next few weeks he began to plan for his future. An image began to form in his mind. He realised that the idea that he had for a new business is what he wanted to do. He would start a small takeaway and restaurant business but keep it to a size where if things went wrong he wouldn’t be over his head. Continue reading “After enduring much trauma, this small business owner finally made a personal breakthrough”

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When good ideas don’t seem to come that easily (and what to do about it)

Brain scanning technology is quickly approachi...
Brain scanning technology is quickly approaching levels of detail that will have serious implications (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ideas can come in a flood. Sometimes your mind bursts with so many ideas and possibilities that the only problem you really have is selecting the best one or two. At other times, ideas seem to be stubbornly locked away in your unconscious and just won’t pop out. Or, they may just come to you in a trickle.

I recently experienced the stubbornness of ideas revealing themselves when I began the work on a marketing plan for a new product. I spoke to others in the business and found out what methods worked for them. I did some additional research on Google and on a members-only international database of articles and research papers related to the product. Continue reading “When good ideas don’t seem to come that easily (and what to do about it)”

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Power questions to help you generate breakthrough ideas

Ideas wherever you care to look.
Ideas wherever you care to look.

Innovation isn’t something that can be reduced to a formula. It can’t be turned into a formal structured process. Nor can it be simplified into fixed rules. You can’t just copy or imitate the methods of another business and expect the same or better results.

An infomercial business owner walks into stores and asks:

“Do you have anything unusual that would make a great gift?” Continue reading “Power questions to help you generate breakthrough ideas”

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Hey Joe, where are you going with that idea in your hand?

I came across a story this week about a man who has come up with a way to make a diesel-like fuel from waste plastic and old tyres. William Graham is testing his fuel in a diesel powered vehicle. His fuel costs 40% less than regular diesel.

William, who believes “nothing is impossible”, also came up with a desalination system for producing fresh drinking water. His technology is used in plants around the world.

Moctar Dembele from Burkina Faso and Gerard Niyondiko from Burundi have created a malaria-repellent soap using local herbs. They won the $25,000 Global Social Venture Competition.

These are people who believe in their ideas and work on them until they become reality.

What about those who walk around with an idea in their hand but don’t do anything with it? Continue reading “Hey Joe, where are you going with that idea in your hand?”

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The secrets of how a mom turned an old smoker into a cash machine

Omul fish, endemic to Lake Baikal (Russia). Sm...
Smoked fish for sale. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was talking to a Chinese restaurateur the other evening about foods in South Africa. He’s newly arrived from mainland China and wants to know the different kinds of foods that South Africans eat and is fascinated by the different cultural influences. He makes a delicious tuna seaweed wrap by the way but that’s another story.

We got talking about the many ways chicken is prepared in the country from rotisserie grilled and deep fried to flame grilled. I mentioned that I had recently bought a smoked chicken from an organic farmer who had discovered a 300-year-old family recipe using hickory wood. The newly-arrived Chinese restaurant owner said he had seen a smoker in America and would love to give smoking a try.

I couldn’t help thinking of the old smoker that my father bought when I was growing up in Kalk Bay. He bought it from a man who had gone into smoking fish commercially out along the old Kommetjie Main Road above the Noordhoek Valley which was only farming land and small holdings in those days. A pioneer, he had been unsuccessful in making a go of it. Continue reading “The secrets of how a mom turned an old smoker into a cash machine”