Tag: idea generation

A couple previously in “marketing” opened a local restaurant-coffee shop with good intentions but after 18 months were forced to sell it. What went wrong?

Strangely enough, it’s simple. They decided they knew what customers wanted. It’s a common mistake. But costly.

In the last few months you could see that things were going wrong. They put exotic items on the menu, attracted the wrong beer swilling crowd, drunken and obnoxious, took away the specials and started charging for Wi-Fi unless you spent a minimum of R50. Continue reading “No matter how creative you are, second-guess customers at your own peril – 8 golden rules”

A small business owner has bought a second-hand restaurant-coffee shop that the previous owner failed to run profitably. So, you might think, what can the new owner do that is going to be different? Has he got new ideas?

The short answer is that the new owner has several ideas on how to turn the business around. I can tell you he’s wasting no time. He’s already clearly defined his market and in the first week is making big changes.

How does this relate to you? Continue reading “How valuable is “creativity” in your life?”

A consumer goods company that came up against an economic downturn decided to turn to the creativity of its employees to reduce internal waste. The company took this action rather than bringing in an external consultant who would most likely have introduced employee retrenchments.

The result: employees identified close to 30 waste points and saved the company a potential $12 million, according to a case study reported in an industrial management journal. Continue reading “Creativity comes in handy during a downturn”

A UK insurer will provide policyholders with a device to generate video footage of a crash using Google’s virtual mapping service.

The device will communicate to the car insurer how the customer was driving, including the speed, location and direction of impact, acceleration and braking immediately before and during the accident, according to an article in the Financial Times. Continue reading “New idea helps car insurance “spy” on your driving to reduce claims”

If you say outrageous things maybe you will get people to listen to you.

A fading, socially guilt-ridden poet wants us all to become like finely chopped up fried eggs.

Yet when the world she lives in is really like one broken ostrich egg with the pieces of shells impossible to put back, you realise she’s an idealistic dreamer, that’s all. Continue reading “Whose advice do you listen to in this attention-screaming information tsunami?”

I visited a solar farm and found out that one of the maintenance issues was the grass growing below the solar panel banks. In the winter the grass was low but when the summer rains come the grass grows quickly and has to be maintained. Various options or alternatives have been looked at but no new ideas have yet been implemented.

This is the thing: when you come up against a problem, you need to do some fact-finding beforehand to fully understand the nature of the problem. In this case what the owners could do is to do some fact-finding by bringing in a soil expert or a horticulturist. Either would give an accurate assessment of what can and can’t be done. The initial solutions about using grass poisons or even bringing in sheep to “mow” the lawn could have implications that are costly. Continue reading “Do your fact-finding before you start to generate new ideas”

If you want to increase your creativity, then it’s actually a good thing to learn speed thinking. The more ideas that you come up with, the more your creative mechanism begins to work. It’s similar to the muscles in your body: those that you build up and develop give you strength; those that you neglect or don’t use lie dormant.

In my book “Breakthrough Ideas, I give you tools and techniques that you can use to speed up your personal idea generation process. One of these tools is a simple list but with a twist (after you have completed this exercise you will come up with ideas and instantly recognise how powerful your creative mind is). One of the main things that this technique teaches is that by accelerating your thinking and generating more ideas, you simply have more options at your disposal. Continue reading “Instant creativity – good for getting you going but here’s what you really need”