How to Come Up With 5-10 Creative Ideas Each and Every Day For Your Business

Do you think about wanting to be more creative, but you struggle with creativity?

Do you try to be creative, but your ideas aren’t fresh and relevant?

Or are you at a loss for where to find ideas?

If so, this article is designed to help you see where to find ideas and apply them to your business, simply by sharing some examples from one day in my own life.

As background, there are 2 key “sides” to the process I’m going to share with you today:

1) Seeing new or unique things in your environment

2) Thinking about how to apply them to your business

I believe this is better illustrated than taught, so I’ll give you a few examples and apply both sides to each.

One more thing about me: I maintain some level of residual awareness of unique and idea-like things on a regular basis. I can go shopping with my wife, walking with my dog, or skiing by myself, and see ideas around me. I often see something (like a traffic jam caused by inefficient placement of merge signs in anticipation of construction ahead) and ask, how can this be done differently to get a better result? I see someone running a sale at a store and wonder if they could have made more sales by reframing the sale. And so on.

Here are a few concrete examples:

(note: you’ll need to read each linked article to get the full effect, this is critical):

I read this article:

http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/heres-project-ara-needs-overcome-succeed/

And as I was reading it, I was asking this question: how could I use this principle in my own business to make my business more efficient, more competitive, and down-right better?

My mind was immediately brimming with ideas.

Try it. Read that article, and then try to think of ways your own business could use the key principle in that article.

Ok, now read this article:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/78e883fa-0bef-11e2-8032-00144feabdc0.html

What questions arise as you read it?

Can you compare what’s in that article about national growth curves to business growth curves?

Do businesses go through growth phases?

Which phase is yours in and what needs to happen in that phase?

Do you see how these questions allow you to mine ideas out of ordinary articles and circumstances?

OK, now this example is going to be a little different. And that’s okay?

Read this and ask, what insights can I get out of this? Is there one idea I can use in my business TODAY to innovate or make my life or business more creative?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-koch/how-to-stop-being-a-hamst_b_5608804.html

How can you use these questions to allow you to see creative moments 5-10 times a DAY?

If you had creative moments 5-10 times a DAY and wrote them all down, when you sat down to innovate in your business once a week, how many ideas would you have to work with?

Sean Mize