How to Generate Ideas

Let’s cut to the chase - the Earth is in trouble and it’s only going to get worse.

What you and I both want is to come up with ideas that can slow down and reverse this planetary damage. So, how do we generate ideas?

The best way to come up with an idea is to start by looking at the problems- define them specifically-  and then explore  their potential solutions.

Who can benefit?

If you’ve found your way to Sustainability Entrepreneur and this particular article, it’s likely that you’re working a full-time job for an organisation, in some area of sustainability or the environment. Or you might just be interested in setting up a sustainability product or service.

What you’re going to learn from this piece of guidance is that there are many ways to spot a problem and use that problem as a launchpad for ideas.

Identify unmet needs

Whatever your role , you’ve probably found yourself looking at things at work and saying ‘we are doing this wrong’, or ‘this shouldn’t be allowed to happen’. These things are symptoms of a broken system.

For Waste Managers, seeing skips around the estate with reusable and recyclable items inside is one example. For Office Managers, seeing that people are not being given the opportunity to recycle and reuse is another example.

Instead of seeing these as problems, start seeing them as opportunities. These pain points or unmet needs are where your solutions and ideas are going to arrive, develop, and take flight.

Take a walk around, write down the issues you see, think about the problems you’ve tried to solve in your job, and highlight the issues that are ongoing.

Here are some great questions to ask:

• Is this issue costing the organisation time, energy, effort, or money?
• Is this a  pain point ? is it causing someone difficulty?
• Are other similar organisations in the sector likely to be affected too?
• What causes you and your colleagues the most problems?
• What do people most often complain about at work?
• What is the one item you never get off your to do list?
• What service are you sure could be improved?
• What does a perfect world look like to you?

Daniel’s Example

Daniel O’Connor was the Waste Manager at Newcastle University. One day he saw dozens of usable chairs that had been thrown out, when he spoke to the person throwing them out, they told him ‘They’ve been dumped on me at the last minute and I don’t have any storage’. He was angry and he had no time to find new homes for them. This is when Daniel spotted the pain point, he saw that the business was paying for disposal and wasting money throwing away reusable assets. He knew there was an opportunity to reuse those assets.

The next day, 30 new chairs turned up. Daniel knew something had to change.

Validate your ideas

We have put together a whole guide on this subject, which you can read throughout this blog.

Generating ideas is one thing, but coming up with with solid, viable, and impactful ideas is a whole different ball game. In the blog, we walk you through various different ways of validating your ideas using a mixture of friends, colleagues, experts, and potential customers.

Our number one tip for validating your idea is to never do it alone. There’s nothing worse than spending months on an idea only to find out it’s rubbish! Bounce your idea off other people first.

How to innovative

The truth is, you don’t need to be an ideas person, you just need to be able to ask open questions in order to identify problems and unmet needs. The closer and more precisely you can define a problem, the closer you can get to a solution.

Here are some ways in which you can wake up your brain and make it more alert, so try to:

• Exercise regularly
• Eat a healthy balanced diet
• Sleep well
• Take regular breaks
• Stand up and look at your immediate environment
• Scan what is causing issues in the media
• What is trending in your subject matter on social media
• This is about scanning for problems in a sea of noise

Bonus tips

You might be able to find your idea simply by looking in the right place, and the right place might simply be where things are happening and being discussed. You might want to try looking at your industry awards ceremonies, take a look at who is winning the awards and what their businesses offer. You might be inspired by this.

You could also start reading some business books and see what’s popular and how their ideas combine with yours. We recommend:

• ‘Do Disrupt: Change the status quo. Or become it’ by Mark Shayler.
• ‘The Four Hour Work Week’ by Timothy Ferriss

Don’t forget to listen to business podcasts too!

Conclusion

Generating ideas can be as simple as spotting problems, understanding the problem and then finding ways to solve them. You don’t need to leave your job, let alone your desk, in order to come up with an incredible solution that helps your organisation to save time, money, and energy. You don’t need to give up your career or completely change paths in order to bring about positive impact.

You just need some ideas to get you started.

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.