My apologies for taking a hiatus from blog-posting. Not that I post very often and not that this may not happen again but I feel like I owe my readers an apology J I’d hit a writers’ block of sorts but now I’m back to your spam folder (for all you guys subscribed to RSS)
It was that time of the year not too long back – the time to be good. In the midst of shopping and wrapping presents I was hit by the ‘combine and recycle’ bug. I had had enough of Xmas 2009’s one-eyed teddy staring spookily at me from virtually every angle I re-located him too. He would do nothing but stare! I also had enough of the horrendous, miniscule ‘Made in China
“Asthma doesn’t seem to bother me any more unless I’m around cigars or dogs. The thing that would bother me most would be a dog smoking a cigar”
A new idea isn’t something that the universe has never seen before but moreover they are recycled and revamped ideas others had that were not successful for whatever reason.
One man’s innovation is another man’s idea. Applying old ideas into new ways can be considered as innovative.
Here are some suggestions by Jack Foster that will help you combine and recycle ideas.
Look for analogues:
Is your problem similar to other problems? What is it dissimilar to? If the USP of your product is its aesthetics, what are the most attractive and most repulsive (one-eyed teddy is copyrighted) things you can think of? Can you compare it to them?
Break the rules
Every activity has its rules and conventions and ways of doing things. They may not be etched in stone but they are in people’s minds. Most of the great advances in science and art are a result of somebody breaking those rules.
Van Gogh broke the rules on what a flower should look like.
David Ogilvy broke the rules on how copy writing should sound.
Play “what if?”
“What if?” is the game many creative people play when trying to come up with a different way to present the benefits of a product or a service.
What if we turned the product or service into a person, what kind of a person would it be? A man? A woman? A truck driver? An artist? A basketball player? What would that person say? How would that person act? What would that person sound like?
Look to other fields for help
In A Whack on the Side of the Head, Dr. Roger von Oech wrote these insightful lines:
“Every culture, industry, discipline, department, an organization has its own way of dealing with problems, its own metaphors, models, and methodologies. But often the best ideas come from cutting across disciplinary boundaries and looking into other fields for new ideas and questions. Nothing will make a field stagnate more quickly than keeping out outside ideas.”
Take Chances
Getting an idea usually means combining things that were never combined before – in other words, taking chances.
One-eyed teddy still glares spookily at me with his 360º vision each time I drop by at Anne’s. Its bonfire night this Saturday and I have a set of spare keys to Anne’s place. Seems to be the most conducive situation for me to break the rules and take a chance.
