Turning bright ideas into the next big thing

When asked the inevitable question, “Where do you get your ideas?” author Neil Gaiman (Coraline, American Gods, Neverwhere) used to quip, “From a little ideas shop in Bognor Regis.” It’s a question that has plagued artists throughout time, but there’s one thing we can say with confidence: none of them ever said, “I get my ideas by sitting alone in a soulless cubicle at work.”

In reality, most humans need an odd combination of stimulus and rest if they’re to come up with something truly original. We all know the familiar story of someone who’s been thinking about a problem for hours without inspiration only to fall asleep and wake up with the answer. Perhaps it’s happened to you.

The question then arises, if we can’t predict when an idea is going to hit us, how do we prepare ourselves for when it does? And how do we cultivate the right surroundings to allow ideas to flourish?

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“The more experiences we have, the more we have to draw from when we’re looking for idea inspiration,” wrote Belle Coope on the always inspirational Zapier blog, who described each bit of knowledge as a dot. “But true creativity is the act of connecting these dots.”

Sitting in the same office, surrounded by the same people, is therefore one sure-fire way of not coming up with inspirational ideas. And if you’re trying to create the next big thing then you’re almost certainly doomed to failure: you might manage to think of a more efficient way to perform a task your company already does, but that’s all.

If your aim is to create the next big thing, then, you have to think bigger. And that means living in the real world.

Get out there!

All the best business ideas solve a problem. In the case of Google, the problem was simply “how do I find the best article about the subject I’m interested in?” At that time, it was a genuine frustration for people searching the internet – existing tools simply weren’t good enough.

Or take Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg created this for his fellow students in Harvard University, who had no easy way to share information with each other. There were broadcast mechanisms, such as campus papers and an intranet, but no way to connect with the person in the dorm next door. And if that person happened to be a young lady that Mark Zuckerberg found attractive, so the story goes, then all the better.

So what problem are you going to solve? Increasingly, the best ideas are solving age-old problems. Uber co-founder, Travis Kalanick, told a summit audience that his inspiration came from Paris. He and a friend were stuck in the middle of nowhere at a tech conference and couldn’t get a cab. They ended up walking back to their hotel, but a company was born.

If you aren’t stuck in the middle of the problem – if you haven’t experienced one of the dots described on the Zapier blog – then you will never hit upon the answer.

Working as a team

One thing all great businesses appear to have in common is that their founders work with others. While an idea almost always strikes one person in that flash of inspiration, you need to supplement your knowledge. For Google it was Sergey Brin and Larry Page; Apple, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak; for Microsoft, Paul Allen and Bill Gates; while Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard made up the constituent parts of HP. Even the great Alan Turing needed Gordon Welchman when creating the bombe.

“No two people exactly duplicate each other’s mental store of items,” wrote Isaac Asimov, possessor of one of the world’s greatest imaginations. “One person may know A and not B, another may know B and not A, and either knowing A and B, both may get the idea – though not necessarily at once or even soon.

“Furthermore, the information may not only be of individual items A and B, but even of combinations such as A-B, which in themselves are not significant. However, if one person mentions the unusual combination of A-B and another the unusual combination A-C, it may well be that the combination A-B-C, which neither has thought of separately, may yield an answer.”

In other words, you need to collaborate to be successful. To draw from others’ experiences and areas of expertise.

Bringing it all together

So, perhaps you’re sitting in your cubicle reading this. Perhaps you’re on the move, reading it on a phone as the train hurtles towards work. Perhaps you’re sitting on a park bench, seeking inspiration.

Whatever you’re doing and wherever you are, you need an effective way to record your ideas. The old-school way of capturing ideas was a notebook, which many authors would have kept in their jacket during the day and by their bed at night. For artists, a sketchbook to transfer that amazing image from eye to pad is a staple tool.

Today, our notebook has transformed into something digital, with some unintended consequences. Perhaps you jot down your ideas on your phone, snap an image with its camera. But then what? The glory of a book is that all ideas or sketches are kept in the same place, a well upon which to draw later. If you don’t have a method for storing electronic ideas, they’re lost to the world simply because you can’t remember where you stored them.

Numerous tools exist to solve this particular problem, but our favourite is OneNote – especially now that it’s reached maturity across every platform we can think of. It works on 99% of phones, laptops and tablets, so your idea will always be there to build upon – and to share.

Developing your idea

So you’ve captured a great idea on your phone – how do you expand upon it? There are times when you’ll want the big canvas of a desktop PC’s 22in display, but other times when you’ll want to draw, annotate and scribble. It’s here where a 2-in-1 device comes into its own.

Take one of HP’s Elite x2 1011 laptops. Undock the screen and you’ve got an 11.6in tablet as your artist’s palette, on which you can draw using the Wacom pen. You can then either pass it to your partners in inspiration, or simply share the live document using your collaboration tool of choice.

If you need to capture some thoughts then the keyboard still reigns supreme. Again the Elite x2 is your friend, with the bundled keyboard turning it into a fully-fledged laptop (in fact, it meets Intel’s tough Ultrabook specifications, with a fast Core M processor on tap).

Then, when you get back to the office, you can hook it up to your big screen – and perhaps get back to your day job.

But, hopefully, if your idea is good enough and you work together with your creative collaborators, you won’t need to do that for much longer.