Where Good Ideas Come From (TED Talk)
What is Original (TED Talk Radio Hour)
Embrace the Remix (TED talk)
“If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants” – Sir Isaac Newton
I believe the idea of being an inventor is inherently flawed. There are very few entirely “new” ideas. Humanity has spent millennia working to get to this point in time. If I believed that I have the capability to build something from scratch with no outside influences, I’d be a fool. We did not get here without building off of those that came before us. So when considering ideation, the best approach is to look at examples and build on top or improve upon what has been proven great.
This may not be the most common belief in the tech community, where people frequently believe that services and products disrupt marketplaces by being original. By doing this, we blind ourselves to potentially better process for ideation. Whenever I try to think of something creative, I strive to assemble some of the best ideas from across a variety of industries. In the above linked podcast, the speakers describe how the music and fashion industries combine great historical examples in new ways to create. The same process can be applied to tech ideation.
Let’s look at Uber as an example. It is arguably the biggest, most disruptive startup we have seen in the past 5 years. The world is applauding Uber for coming into a stale market with a brand new product. But Uber is merely a combination of the many pieces of software that support it. The company uses Google Maps to navigate and coordinate its drivers, the device’s GPS to locate both car and passenger, a payments processor, and many more components. Each of these were once stand-alone products, now they are being used as building blocks.
Another method for ideation is to look at other industries and imagine some way to use the original idea in a new way. One of my favorite examples of this is in marketing. An example from the best product growth podcast ever (skip to 40:50): Jared Fliesler talks about the unique way that Intuit marketed Quickbooks. Give it a listen as I can’t do justice to the phrasing.
My final piece of advice on ideation is that creativity requires constraints. Imagine having someone tell you to be creative. No rules, no guidelines, they just say “be creative, show me something.” Now imagine that instead, they had handed you a pen and paper and said be creative. This completely changes the types of things that you may create. Expanding this argument to the tech space, look for ways to create constraints on projects or ideation times. These can be artificial such as narrowing the goal to a specific industry or outcome or they can be imposed upon you by system limitations or physical constraints. A great way to do this is to look at a building block, such as the Google Maps API, in order to build something. Who knows, maybe you’ll make the next Uber.
Photo Source: Wikipedia (Creative Commons)
I just got my boxes unpacked and accomplished the first thing I wanted to do after moving to San Francisco: Attending my first Meetup. The number of meetups available on meetup.com has exponentially increased as I move into the home of open-source software and companies who want to host events. Free food, free beer, and best of all, free learning.
Lean Analytics – Ken Norton (Google Ventures)
Britton Stamper 
