How to get better ideas

Ideas and innovation don’t generally emerge from a single point, team or a company. They don’t jump to existence in sterile offices, by employees pushed or forced to think about innovation.

They emerge over coffee tables, over lunch or beer, when seemingly irrelevant parties talk about random shit. An idea needs versatility and variety to be born. An engineer will always think along engineering lines, but sit him down with an artist and watch the ideas flow. Different ways of thinking, backgrounds and experiences are more likely to give birth to strong ideas and innovation, than if all the thinking that goes into it is along the same lines. That’s the bane of most companies – they start off as innovative (precisely because their people / founders have varying backgrounds), but once they settle into a corporate lifestyle, innovation slows down.

You can do that too, for yourself. Keep doing the same thing, keep attending the same events, keep reading the same books and trying the same work to make money – and you’ll slow yourself down.

Change that – go out and try different events, meet with people with different way of thinking or backgrounds, read books from a variety of genres or even ones that contradict your values, and you will certainly kick start your innovative thinking.