Five Random New Ideas

Generating new ideas is easy if you know the right techniques. Here are five I came up with while watching the snow fall outside the window. Those are followed by a few suggestions for creating new ideas.

1. A new kind of answering machine. Answering machines have our own messages, prerecorded messages, and funny messages. How about an answering machine that has different messages depending on who is calling? The idea here is to have the machine connected to the caller ID. If no data is available a generic message plays. But if it is 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, but don't worry..."

2. Could mosquito blood solve a crime? This idea may be more suited to a fiction story than real police work, but the idea is logical. If a suspect says he wasn't in an area and the police need to prove he was, they could test the blood collected by mosquitoes for the suspect's DNA. Since mosquitoes don't travel far, determining that he was there by finding his DNA in this way would be fairly conclusive.

3. Power naps have been shown to reduce stress and increase productivity. The problem if you work in a busy office or busy city is finding a quiet place to take one, and being able to fall asleep quickly. A storefront operation that has something like tanning booths may be the answer. With proven brainwave entrainment CDs to listen too, sleep would come easily and quickly.

4. Withdrawn children were found to permanently change their behavior and join in activities with others, after watching a video of similarly withdrawn children joining the group.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 videos. Make motivational "story videos" in which someone like you learns to do whatever you want to do (learn to dance, speak in front of a crowd, or whatever). Done with many types of people, so you could choose one with a character most like yourself, to make it more realistic and motivating.

5. Multiple plot-line novels. The new idea here is to use the internet to publish a novel that is really a dozen or more stories in one. The reader chooses which way the story should go, and so clicks through to the pages that complete that version of the story. This has been proposed for books before, but with paper books it becomes too cumbersome.

Learn a few good techniques, and you can come up with a hundred new ideas in an evening of brainstorming. Some of the best are the simplest as well. Getting 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 simply find a new application for an existing idea, which is how I arrived at the idea for the motivational videos. There are dozens of these techniques. Of course some of the ideas above may already be put into use by others by the time you read this, which points up another important fact about new ideas: It is a lot easier to have them than to do something with them.