Five New Ideas to Implement
Coming up with new and interesting ideas is easy if you know
the right techniques. The following are five I came up with while
watching the snow fall outside the window. Those are followed
by a few suggestions for creating ideas on your own.
1. Power naps reduce stress and increase productivity. But
if you work in a busy office or busy city how do you find a quiet
place to take one, and how do you fall asleep quickly? A storefront
operation with something like tanning booths may be the answer.
Using brainwave entrainment CDs, sleep would come easily and
quickly.
2. Can mosquito blood be used to solve a crime? The idea may
be more suited to fiction than real police work, but it is logical.
A suspect says he wasn't in an area and police need to prove
he was, so they could test the blood collected by mosquitoes,
looking for the suspect's DNA. Mosquitoes don't travel far, so
to find his DNA in this way would be fairly conclusive.
3. A new answering machine. They have our own messages, prerecorded
messages, and funny messages. How about an answering machine
with different messages depending on who is calling? Have the
machine connected to the caller ID. If no data is available a
generic message plays, but if it's one of the numbers you programmed
to hear a certain message, the caller gets a personalized response.
"Hi mom, I'm not here right now..."
4. Multiple plot novels. Use the internet to publish a novel
that is really a dozen or more stories in one. The reader chooses
which way the story goes, and clicks through to the pages that
complete his or her version of the story. The idea has been proposed
for books before, but with paper books it becomes too cumbersome.
5. Many withdrawn children permanently change their behavior
and join in activities with others, after watching a video of
similarly withdrawn children joining the group. Why not apply
that idea to a series of motivational videos? Make "story
videos" in which someone like the viewer learns to do whatever
they want to do (learn to dance, speak in front of a crowd, or
whatever). Use many types of people for each, so the viewer can
choose one with a character most like himself, to make it more
realistic and motivating.
With a few good techniques you can come up with a hundred
new ideas in an evening of brainstorming. Some of the better
ones are the simplest as well. The new answering machine idea,
for example, involved nothing more than looking at my answering
machine and asking what could be changed.
Another simple technique is to find a new application for
an existing idea. This is how I arrived at the idea for the motivational
videos. Of course there are dozens of these techniques. But some
of the ideas above may be put into use by others by the time
you read this, which points up another important fact about ideas:
It's easier to have them than to do something with them.
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