Five Inspiring Ideas to Help You Generate Business Ideas
Where do you find new business ideas? And does innovation need to be a formal, documented process, or can a more casual approach work? Before you try to answer those seemingly overwhelming questions, you should check these five inspiring business ideas first.
Find the Needs in the Market
Develop a lifestyle of responsibility by doing what no one else wants to do. Always be the first to take up the challenge and never stop asking yourself, ‘Can I make money from this?’ Several businesses have been developed from doing what people will rather delegate. Typical cases include the laundry and dry cleaning business, and the delivery business.
Hoard Any Information You Can Get
Smart50 stars, for example, are ferocious information gatherers, and they suggest reading business books, going to conferences and signing up to industry newsletters.
“We sign up to every industry e-newsletter, attend online retailer conferences, talk to other people in the industry, workshop ideas with our team, read books and articles, go to trade fairs around the world and look to other websites, locally and internationally, that we admire,” says Erica Stewart, co-founder of online retailer Hard to Find.
“We’ve found that every conversation leads to something, so we try to say ‘yes’ to as many meetings as we can – it’s impressive how many pearls of wisdom we’ve gained just by having a chat!”
GMG Search Engine Optimisation takes a slightly different approach, choosing instead to encourage employees to learn as much as they can and then bring that learning to work.
Examine Your Passion
The best business is the one you build around your passion. Because only passion can get you through the lean days when all the business has got is prospects. There is always a way to commercialize your passion, and you only need to figure it out.
Learn from Your Clients
What would be the one thing that would make a difference to your client? Find a way to satisfy that need, and you’ll have a new business idea, as well as one happy customer on your hands. New business opportunities come from knowing the business’ clients well.
You should try to talk to them, go on ski trips with them, drink wine with them and discover what drives them and what’s getting in the way of them getting what they want.
Keep Notes on Ideas
If this is the first time you try to generate business ideas and try them out, you can skip. But if this is your second and third attempts, try to document all the ideas that have come across your mind. Note your errors and play the what-if scenarios, especially for your failures. And when the opportunity presents itself, develop the business ideas of the century from them.
