Here are some myths about where good ideas come from and ways to stimulate idea-generation at your company. What do the printing press and Apple have in common? They give it top priority. Oakshire Mushroom's claim to fame is a sawdust log for growing shiitakes that reduces the harvest time from four years to four months. "For the last holiday catalog, we got 50 ideas from two-dozen people that buyers could follow up on," brags Raap, who offers employees monetary rewards for their ideas. Stephenson, like many entrepreneurs, considers himself a world-class snoop; he fishes out ideas and then sends them on for refining. So Schroeder and his team arrived at an unconventional solution: they'd sell their expertise to rival farms. What do you think of that?" It's not his concern. Schroeder concedes that he broke the 20-hour rule recently to work on the financing of his next big idea. Johnson presents the answers to these questions and more in his infectious, culturally omnivoracious style, using examples from thinkers in a range of disciplines - from Charles Darwin to Tim Berners-Lee - to provide the complete, exciting, and encouraging story of inspiration. None are stupid. In Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson, one of our most innovative popular thinkers, explores the secrets of inspiration. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. CIBT's Brad Cary writes down every business idea he has--a habit he developed in business school. MYTH 4 'It takes only one brainstorming meeting to generate more ideas than we can handle'. For starters, three managers now share the job of running the company's operations. Ideas are best shaped through an ongoing companywide dialogue; what happens between get-togethers can be every bit as crucial as what happens during them. Even Kuhn concedes that he'll consort with a small group of key accounts once an idea has moved into the testing stage. About six months ago Kuhn came up with another idea that helps him stay focused. In fact, it can be downright demoralizing. "The market changes so rapidly that at any moment you have to give up what you are for what you could be." Shopify’s free naming brand generator lets you jump from naming your brand to securing the domain name, to starting your small business - all in a few clicks. "We hope she will become a supplier of herb plants and related products for us," notes Raap. MYTH 3 'If you listen to customers, they'll tell you what to do', What Cameron Kuhn is about to say would be considered heresy in some quarters, where CEOs have come to believe (much to the annoyance of their salespeople) that tagging along with salespeople is a can't-miss strategy for collecting ideas. But there's a reason such simple--indeed, civilized--approaches don't work anymore: competition. Reeves's 1996 meeting with an Arizona inventor quickly led to the development of the Connection Tent, a two-room tent connected by a tunnel, which accounted for more than $5 million in sales in its first year. The company decided to go beyond what the U.S. Department of Agriculture required seed-corn suppliers to provide on their tags, he says. Research questions often begin as more general research ideas—usually focusing on some behaviour or psychological characteristic: talkativeness, learning, depression, bungee jumping, and so on. "I was in my own world at that point," he says. It may seem like all of the good business ideas or the best small business ideas have been taken, but they are not. Maybe because the bottle's contents were safely corked inside. Your employees would be unlikely to doubt you (openly, anyway) if you attributed the idea you cherish most to your fanatical devotion to feng shui, the newly faddish Chinese practice of arranging a room to maximize the flow of energy. The sheer volume and quality of ideas a growing company consumes means that it's no longer feasible for a CEO to take each one firmly in hand, clutching it tightly through every perilous intersection. Furthermore, Amos is also holding monthly two-and-a-half-hour "renewal" meetings for all employees, to provide updates on ideas in development. moments. His fascinating tour takes us from the "liquid networks" of London's coffee houses to Charles Darwin's long, slow hunch to … Though Stephenson provided the original spark, he hardly claims credit for all that followed. The CEO of Crunch, an innovative New York City-based chain of gyms whose offerings include gospel aerobics and coed wrestling, gets his 30-person staff together weekly to discuss the offbeat ideas he gathers from all over: clothing and computer trade shows, restaurants, clubs, and competing gyms. "But they asked a lot of questions that made me think--they were thinking more about how do we implement this, and why.". He is the founder of a variety of influential websites and writes for Time, Wired, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Before looking at how to turn such ideas into empirically testable research questions, it is worth looking at where such ideas come from in the first place. As a starting point—before conducting customer research—many companies estimate that 10% to 20% of revenue will come from Good, 25% to 50% from Better, and 30% to 60% from Best. The results were more than encouraging: four staffers proved to be so skilled at developing good products that it's become part of their jobs. Simple. "I was too involved," he admits. And everybody knows the type of CEOs who tend to star in such episodes: the tireless searchers who--on top of running their fast-growing companies--never seem to run short of either ideas or new places to scavenge for them. And what does this have to do with the creation and evolution of life itself? Late last year someone stopped Jim Amos in the hall and stuffed a bunch of papers into his hands. The vineyard owner talked about harvest conditions, this list of things the crop had gone through to bring these grapes along. Steven Johnson is the bestselling author of Future Perfect, Where Good Ideas Come From, The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, and Everything Bad is Good for You, and is the editor of The Innovator's Cookbook. Why have cities historically been such hubs of innovation? ALSO BY STEVEN JOHNSON WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM The Natural History of Innovation But Steven Johnson shows how history tells a different story. "The cycle of growth, of decline and renewal, is so compressed today," notes Jim Amos, CEO and president of franchisor Mail Boxes Etc., which has faced stiff competition. In Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson, one of our most innovative popular thinkers, explores the secrets of inspiration. Innovative ideas are the competitive edge for most entrepreneurial companies. Once you've adjusted your own role to make room for idea gathering--as well as motivated and educated your employees to work with the raw material of ideas--there's one more tool you'll need to join the ranks of the top idea generators: a suck index. Reeves had no hesitation about giving the idea, intended for his company's internal use, a thumbs-up. They have the customer relationships--why would I want to step into the middle of that?". With so many business ideas, finding the right one is easier said than done. "For years we'd been looking for ways to pull ourselves out of the commodity market, set ourselves apart," he says. At the other end of the spectrum, Mail Boxes Etc. How do smart entrepreneurs know where their next idea is coming from? In recent years CEOs have been battered--by competition or, even worse, by management gurus--into making employees part of the idea-generating process by just about any means necessary. Who does? And what do we need to know and do to have more of them? And what does this have to do with the creation and evolution of life itself? Having started nine years ago as a slide-show producer, the company has found itself in one cutthroat industry after another--from systems integration to photo-lab services to Web design, adding hundreds of services in nine different niches. "The owner's name was right on the bottle, and that impressed me." What do the printing press and Apple have in common? So advises Gary Schroeder, CEO of Oakshire Mushroom Farm Inc., a $5-million grower based in Kennett Square, Pa. Schroeder has for the past two years cleared his calendar so that more than half his time is spent doing what he loves: nurturing new ideas while getting his hands dirty in the greenhouse, and calling impromptu brainstorming sessions.

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