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As part of your professional development and curiosity, it’s likely that you will attend workshops, events, expos, and exhibitions. Perhaps you’ll go to one per year, maybe even one per month. We want to help you see these as an opportunity to generate ideas for your own project or business.
"Positivity, confidence, and persistence are key in life, so never give up on yourself" - Khalid
Generating commercial sustainability ideas
The format of some events is that there’s an exhibition space with expert speakers in different areas. To build upon their talks, quite often they also host workshops. So, what you’ve got is an opportunity to learn from a master, and then get into a room with other experts and interested parties from the same field or niche. What could be better? This is an absolute goldmine for knowledge and commercial sustainability idea generation around your chosen niche.
Idea source 1 - Speaker sessions
Speaker sessions involve an expert in the field, someone selling a solution, or someone presenting a case study. If you attend these sessions, you’ll notice that the speakers explore the problems they faced, the barriers that were in their way, and how they navigated them to forge a solution. That’s the typical framework.
The speakers will usually tell you how you can get over those same barriers and then they will show you the shortcut to success. You can hear about problems faced in the industry, you can listen to the solutions they came up with, and often they will even provide a verbal action plan for making a solution. When you’re setting up a business, you’re trying to solve problems and learn how to convince customers that you can help them. Speakers have usually done the same thing, and are spelling out their process. Listen to their problems, and start to come up with alternative solutions. Listen to the sales professionals persuade you of their product, remember their language, and break down arguments.
The case study method is another great way to pick up ideas, because these case studies are often carried out by organisations on a small or local basis, and aren’t yet scaled up. If you keep hearing case studies trying to solve the same problem, you can connect the dots and try to find a solution that is scalable. You listen to what they did on a local level, and you begin to imagine what a national version might look like.
Idea source 2 - Typical networking
Get out there and talk to people. Talk to peers, talk to experts, ask them questions, explore their problems. Don’t be afraid to dig deep, and ask "Hey, what do you do? Where do you work? What sort of problems do you face within your work at the moment? What takes the most time? What's the most expensive? Where (or why) isn't there already a solution on the market? What are you really struggling with?”
These questions can lead to excellent conversations about the problems being faced. Say you talk to 30 people and two or three of them express the same issue, you can begin to see that the problem is not being well served in the marketplace.
Read Daniel’s tips on how to have conversations at an event.
Idea source 3 - Talk to suppliers
You’re going to find all sorts of established businesses intermingling with new startups who are just beginning to get their services into the marketplace. You’re going to see a lot of pitches at events and you can learn from being exposed to them.
You’re not going to fully invest yourself in someone else’s idea in the same way that you buy into your own, but you can talk to suppliers and learn about their problem-solving motivations. Ask every exhibitor you talk to about the main problems they are solving, ask them what issues the industry is facing, and ask them ‘why?’. Narrow down the details by asking more and more questions if you can.
Talking to suppliers is going to help you better understand the problems so that you can generate your own ideas. It’s a positive stimulus.
Idea source 4 - Talk to entrepreneurs
Many of the entrepreneurs you will meet at events have already got a product in the marketplace. Since entrepreneurs are natural born idea generators, they’ll keep on coming up with solutions even while they’re putting their time and energy into something they have more conviction about. They may consider their other ideas to be throwaway, unimportant, or too difficult to pursue. If you can have a good chat with some entrepreneurs and build rapport by asking the right questions, you can tell them about your journey. You can say “I want to be where you are in a year’s time. I am trying to generate ideas. Have you got any ideas that you think might be good?”.
Some of them might tell you to go away, but people like us here at Sustainability Entrepreneur are going to give generous time to a curious entrepreneur and tell them what ideas they think would work for the sector and for the future.
Conclusion
There you have it, four ideas for generating ideas at exhibits, expos, workshops, and events. These events and methods should put you in a great frame of mind for generating ideas. As we said earlier, you can only really generate great ideas when you understand and become familiar with the problem you want to fix.
Have you joined up to our "6 Week Welcome Email Series" yet? This takes you incrementally through setting a vision and generating ideas. Click the button below.
