Measuring the value of an idea is like making a statement about the length of a piece of string. How long is a piece of string? It depends: they aren’t all the same. The same is true about ideas. Some are good, some are awful, and there’s a wide range of quality in between.

Some people think that ideas are a dime a dozen; in fact, I’ve had at least three new ideas in the three minutes that I’ve spent writing this post. I expect many more to follow. Most of those ideas will be next to worthless:

• impractical
• expensive
• time-consuming
• and of limited appeal to most normal people.

Perhaps I’ll have a really wonderful, brilliant, spectacular idea and heaven help me if I forget to write it down or else it’ll be lost in the ether, never to return.

Who know what brilliant concepts, works of art, etc. were lost due to forgetfulness? Author Garrison Keillor, in the introduction to Lake Wobegon Days, tells the tale of a magical, wonderful set of short stories that he wrote… and then forgot in a restroom while traveling. Apparently Lake Wobegon Days is not that batch of stories, but instead was the best he could come up with afterward. I don’t know that I believe this tale, but nonetheless it’s always interesting to think about what might have been or what might be.

If this blog post about the value of an idea seems a bit different from my normal blog posts, it’s because I’ve been listening to Stephen Fry’s Podgrams and I’m imagining that he’s dictating the blog post to me now. I can hear his voice sounding out each word as it appears on the computer screen. Well, not literally of course, but it is an exercise of imagination, after all, and thus I’m trying out an idea that I had and I’m just realizing that now.

This isn’t exactly a Flattery by Imitation post, but it’s not bad for a Friday, especially the one after the US Thanksgiving when a number of my readers may still be recovering from the lingering effects of Tryptophan induced coma.

Thank you for reading and I’ll lighten the load on your mind by ending this blog post with an idea (hah!) that I just had while finishing this blog post:

“I CAN HAZ TURKEE SAMMICH?”

Other posts that you might enjoy reading:

• Audio blog post – about names
• Speedlinking and a status report – January 29 2010
• Captions on the front of digital photos
• Get brainy
• Kickstarting your creative infrastructure in a Web 2.0 world

Just catching up to this post about idea creation by Hank Williams at Why Does Everything Suck?

Here’s an excerpt:

I am a member of the NextNY mailing list which is a group of New York folks that talk about tech business and entrepreneurship. A recent conversation and actually a persistent theme in that group is that in a startup, an idea is worth 1% and execution is worth 99% or some other highly disproportionate ratio.

I take issue with the concept.

Here’s the problem with the formulation. It belies a misunderstanding of what an actionable “idea” really is. A good idea is almost never some light bulb moment that occurs where you realize some insight that no one else has seen. In truth there are few of those. Very, very few people are that smart or that lucky. Great actionable ideas are really a collection of much smaller ideas, weaved together in such a way as to create something useful unique and compelling. There are few actionable “aha” moments.

In other words, to me, coming up with great actionable ideas requires lots of perspiration, iteration, and ideation. However, once you have an actionable idea that has been achieved through this process it is worth *way* more than 1%.

Great stuff, Hank.

I left the following comment in response:

I think that the idea could be worth a lot more than than the 1% valuation as well, but I look at it from a different point of view. A great idea, with a good plan behind it, is the product of a lot of work. The planning, thinking, and critiquing, when done properly, can eliminate wasted effort during the life of implementing this idea. A former colleague once used the following rule for testing: one day of test planning is worth (or saves) three days of actual testing by eliminating lost time. If the valuation is based on time and effort, then the time taken to develop a stellar idea would be significantly greater than the 1%.

If you’re interested in the process in developing and creating ideas (or content), I recommend checking this out.

Other posts that you might enjoy reading:

• Does brainstorming really yield good ideas?
• 22 Ultra Inspiring Blogs About Creativity and Idea Generation
• Where good ideas come from
• Culling the Fields of Awe – Idea Generation

/ponder

Originally uploaded by striatic

Out inspecting in the Fields of Awe… back soon.

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Every blogger’s dream is to consistently create great content that’s new, unique, and compelling. It won’t go anywhere without inspiration or source material. What can you do when you’re stuck, particularly when you need good ideas for your blog or other types of creative content?

Take heart. Don’t panic.

Three basic ways of finding good ideas include:

• The solitary search
• Idea collisions
• Collaboration and feedback

Let’s look at each method.

The solitary search

There are different ways that we can look at finding and developing ideas as a solo prospector:

• Seeing greatness in a block of stone (sculptor) or in a piece of driftwood (carver/whittler) and hammering, chipping, or whittling it out.
• Sowing seeds of facts and thoughts that, given the right conditions, will yield life (I think of this process as cultivating the Fields of Awe)
• Fishing for ideas in a sea of inspiration (just don’t deplete the stocks without giving them a chance to replenish themselves!)
• Panning for gold (tedious straining and searching to find a limited supply of tiny nuggets amongst a lot of dirt, mud, and water)
• Sweating it out and trying to force something good out (happens all too often in a process that is somewhat comparable to constipation of the mind)

Sometimes you find something of value lying in wait, just waiting to be picked up and used. It can be rewarding when you find something good, but it can be pretty lonely when you can’t find what you are looking for.

Idea collisions

Good things, however, often do result from the collision of ideas. In his book On Writing, Stephen King tells the story about how he matched two seemingly unrelated concepts to produce the core concepts behind his novel Carrie. Idea collisions, the combination of ideas that fit together in an unexpected or unusual way, have been a successful source of material for content creators. Sometimes it does pay to mix and match.

On the flip side, Seth Godin’s book Meatball Sundae spends a lot of time talking about how marketing, and business itself, needs to be different to match the Web 2.0/Business 2.0 marketplace. He suggests that it’s a bad idea to apply new marketing techniques (which resemble the tasty toppings on a sundae) to boring old business (making “meatballs”, as he puts it). In his opinion, meatball sundaes – the combination of things that may be good separately, but don’t work together – are bad ideas. These two things just don’t go together.

Idea collisions can produce interesting combinations that fuel further creativity. Just make sure you do train a critical eye, and apply common sense, on the results at some point before locking in.

Collaboration and feedback

You can take the search for inspiration in a different direction by looking at locations or communities where conversations and ideas flow at a breakneck pace, such as the various types of social media sites and applications that exist today. I’ve talked about a few of them at this blog, like:

• other blogs, with or without RSS feeds
• Twitter
• bookmarking
• lifestreaming
• comments
• links of all kinds
• offline publications (books, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, etc.)
• television programming
• movies
• radio/podcasts

The most amazing thing about social media is that it brings people together who might not ever meet. I regularly link to and get links back from people who I only know by the images they post and the words that they produce from their keyboards. Through different types of conversations we can find multiple areas of common interest and these discussions sometimes act as the spark to ignite a creative firestorm of your own. And you don’t even have to be in the same room.

You might not see yourself as a John Lennon or Paul McCartney, or any of the other famous songwriting collaborators, but you can’t deny that there’s magic there. And one of the coolest feelings that you can experience is when you and your collaborator feed off each other’s concepts and jointly create something remarkable.

Now that we’ve covered these three basic techniques, here are a couple of other things to consider:

Make new or renewable resources

Occasionally we give back to the social media community, whether it’s an attempt to provide lists of blog post ideas to help someone who’s struggling with their own content, or creating resource lists of places to find inspiration. I think this is a very worthwhile practice.

Example 1 – amongst Chris Brogan’s amazing body of work, he’s created not just one but two great resources for blog post ideas. And he’s one of hundreds of people to do that for the community.

If you’ve found a tool or technique that helps to stimulate the creative processes, don’t hesitate to share it!

Example 2 - Darren Rowse regularly shares techniques with his readers: his post on mind mapping is just one example.  Here’s another post with a practical example of mind mapping.

Parting thought

If you’re struggling, don’t let it get you down. There’s a lot of help available out there on the Web that you can find without too much work. Hopefully a few of these resources will help.

Other posts that you might enjoy reading:

• 22 Ultra Inspiring Blogs About Creativity and Idea Generation
• Captions on the front of digital photos
• Get brainy
• Does brainstorming really yield good ideas?
• The value of an idea

One of the biggest challenges of any creative type of person, either professional or amateur, is finding really good ideas. Today’s digital world is increasingly dependent upon the generation of good ideas that other people will like and find useful. While it’s true that we all have our own personal likes and dislikes, ideas allow us to find common ground with other people. Ideas are a source of conversation, enjoyment, and bonding between people. We don’t always have to share the same opinion about the ideas themselves, but an interesting idea gives us a chance to discuss something and, through the course of the conversation, reveal and share other things about each other.

Ideas are also the drivers of things like:

• entertainment
• businesses, products and services
• government
• society, social norms, and social change
• education

Ideas are very powerful. Ideas led to the creation of all of the goods and services that we use daily. Ideas shape how we live our lives. Ideas shape how we talk to each other. Ideas shape how we perceive the world.

Ideas are an important reason to read blogs.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could pick up a catalog, select the great idea you want, and just get it without any more fuss and without having to compete with anyone else?

If that were the case, I probably wouldn’t be writing this post.

I don’t claim to be an expert at generating ideas, although I use a number of the common techniques that people suggest, like brainstorming; mind mapping; and trial ballooning. However, there are probably a number of idea-generation, um, ideas, that I could share with you. They’re all out there in the marketplace.

One source that I’d like to share with you in this post comes from a book called Advantage Play: The Manager’s Guide To Creative Problem Solving (you might be able to get it in Canada at this source if still available) by David Ben. David is a professional magician, entertainer, and speaker who has written about magic (slight-of-hand and illusion, that sort of thing.) He’s described some of his experiences with other magicians, including some of the techniques that he’s learned from them to create new magic tricks, stunts, or experiences. There’s a chapter or two in his book that I highly recommend reading if you are interested in ways to spark creativity and idea-generation. Many of these ideas revolve around the concept of putting two or more things together to see if they generate further ideas, but the book describes some very creative ways to do this through the use of imagery.

Advantage Play is just one example of the materials out there that you can use to be creative and generate new ideas. As I come across new and interesting methods for creativity, I’ll try to pass them along.

Thus ends this brain broadcast. Here’s hoping we all find a little more spark and magic in our lives.

Other posts that you might enjoy reading:

• Does brainstorming really yield good ideas?
• 22 Ultra Inspiring Blogs About Creativity and Idea Generation
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