If you’re doing the same thing as your competitors, you’re
going to get the same results, which means you’re a commodity. Not good.
So you need to be thinking outside
the box. “Ok,” you say, “so how do I do that?”
Good question. Years
ago, when I was working with new product inventor Doug Hall, he did a study,
which he subsequently recapped in his book Jump
Start Your Brain. Doug sat people
down in an empty room with a pencil and a pad of paper, and asked them to write
down vacation ideas. Then he sat
different people down in a room filled with Globes, Sunday newspaper
supplements, travel magazines, atlases, etc. and asked them to write down
vacation ideas. Of course, the people in
the stimulus-rich room outperformed the people in the bare room by orders of
magnitude. So we know that outside
stimuli can help foster more ideas.
There’s a second part to this, though. The further out of
the box you want to get, the more unrelated your stimuli should be from the subject
you’re focusing on. If you’re trying to
develop a new kind of broom, you are unlikely to get very far outside the box
by using mops, rakes, and dustpans as stimuli.
Surrounding yourself with circus posters, children’s toys, furniture
catalogs, and a selection of food packaging for stimuli (there’s nothing magic
about this mix—any similarly eclectic collection of items would do) is likely
to generate more far out ideas.
It’s like there’s a rubber band connecting the idea you’re
trying to develop and your stimuli. The
further you stretch it, the more unusual (and potentially profitable) the
connections you’ll come up with. It
takes work to stretch the rubber band further than anyone else. But that work that will yield results.
Some of the ideas you’ll come up with will be silly. But you only need one good one to make the
work pay off. And that good idea is more
likely to show up outside the box.
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