Ideas are what changes the world, and for generating a great idea you need to be creative, you need to abandon traditional ways of looking into things, make strange familiar and familiarly strange.
If you want the ultimate solution to a problem, you should have an irrational process of thinking about it, but the solution should be rational.
I am not an engineer, though I learned to code during my elementary school. The first product I decided to build was a billing and inventory management software for local medicine shops. The medicine stores are inventory heavy, and they have to maintain many brands to cater to a broader audience. This may not sound like a unique idea, but to me, it just struck when I visited a store asking for a couple of medicines, and the guy on the counter had to spend 25 minutes searching for it. I was thinking to walk away and shop at another store in the meantime, getting irritated due to long wait time, but I still decided to wait some more. That’s when the guy at the counter came to me and told me in an apologising tone that they don’t have the medicines I asked for. Apparently, the stock of the medicines was over, and he hadn’t ordered for the new batch. And then it magically struck me — why can’t I build software that will help him keep track of his inventory, and also help him develop a systematic approach to keeping them in the store. I asked him about the owner of the store, went ahead and pitched him for an inventory management software. He kind of liked it and offered me INR 25k, roughly USD 400(in 1998) to build it for him. Maybe that idea was not unique or new or innovative, but it worked for me as well as that shop owner.
I have again found a problem which I can solve, an idea which will change the current state for students who find difficulty in choosing a right career for them. I have found a perfect solution(I think) for a problem faced by almost all the students pursuing higher studies. I will share the problem statement with you very soon. I think you also have an idea which you want to work on, a solution which can bring a revolution. But how do you evolve it into a product, how do you evaluate that idea so that you can deem it worthy of pursuing? My process of deciding on an idea is to go to all founders and mentors in my contact and ask them what they think about it. Indeed, I need validation, but that is not why I go to every one. I go to listen, not just to seek the approval. If you talk to 100 people about an idea, at least 60 will add value by either discarding and suggest an alternative or share their inputs about it. Also, when somebody discards your concept, they tend to share what they think are better ideas than the one you shared. Every one of them has this thing in common; they are happy to be of any help they can. They refine your ideas for better, and I pick stuff from there, and those insights come handy for developing features.
One more thing I am practising to refine my idea is a technique called SCAMPER. SCAMPER is a technique of asking questions which were created by Bob Eberle in 1970s. I have written an elaborate post explaining SCAMPER in detail here. To give you a brief introduction, SCAMPER stands for Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Magnify, Put to other uses, Eliminate and Rearrange(or reverse); and the technique is all about asking questions around your idea or the problem you want to solve, using the SCAMPER checklist as a guide. So, I ask questions like can I replace someone involved in the process, or can the rules be changed or at what magnitude I can create an impact with the idea. For example, Airbnb substituted the hotels in the traditional hospitality business and impacted hundreds of thousands of ‘host’ who now can earn additional income by offering a part(or whole) of their houses on rent. SCAMPER is the best idea generation technique I have come across, and I, to some extent, tend to use this in almost all the projects.
So, now I am in the process of evolving my idea, and as promised I will share all the details of it and also share the process as well. I hope you can find it helpful for your future ventures. If you have any query, do ask me in the comments. Also, please share your feedback and suggestions to improve this series.
Originally published at entreprenology.in on November 23, 2017.
