Andre Ivanchuk

• You’re in business; stuff always comes up in the last minute
• For ideas, look at moving categories that other entrepreneurs are missing and focus on the niche
• Look deep into the data to look for opportunities
• Prototype quick, if it gains traction, make it big
• Entrepreneurs have some kind of level of A.D.D.

Source: David Cancel (@dcancel) of Performable, through Mixergy on 6/4/2010

When you have an idea and make the idea public, one of three things will happen, and what you should learn from each one…

1. Everyone will ignore the idea – What could this mean… Your idea did not fill a need or a desire. The conditions may not be prime. Learn from this experience by studying current social and market trends, including basic human needs. Every idea must fill a core human need.

2. Someone will unsuccessfully copy the idea – In other words, they end up creating an inferior product and yours remains the better of the two, and gains greater traction. Learn from their mistakes. Other people’s mistakes often give us an insight into the strengths of our ideas, giving us even a greater opportunity to leverage on the strengths.

3. Someone will successfully copy the idea – They steal the idea and make it better. If you have no option for legal repercussion – learn from their success, your failure, and move on.

Takeaway: Learn from each scenario, whether or not your idea was a success.

Every successful entrepreneur has his own criteria for measuring the success factor of an idea for starting a business. There is also value in studying how others make decisions. Norm Brodsky, a veteran entrepreneur who founded and built half a dozen large companies, uses a simple approach when starting a business.

According to Brodsky, three factors must be at play when venturing out:

An Established Concept

Education can be expensive. Educating the masses can be really expensive, not to mention a daunting task for a business to undertake. Stick with something people are familiar with.

Focusing on an established concept does not lessen your ability to create innovative and revolutionary products. Take Apple for example. They’ve been doing the same thing since day one – developing technology that is intuitively simple, functional and beautiful. The iPad, the iPhone, the Touch – these are all familiar devices. The market does not need a crashcourse on what these devices are and what they do. Yet, they are truly remarkable products that challenge our accepted perception of what technology is able to do, how it’s able to do it – and its aesthetics. Human-centered design has been around for centuries, yet Apple continues to push the envelope.

Takeaway – Instead of painfully searching for the “next big wow thing”, identify a familiar or understood industry/product and build upon it. Just look at what Aaron Patzer did with mint.com – genius!

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We as humans are creative beings by nature. By our design and DNA we are wired to make stuff and create. The creative drive comes from a inner place, far behind our intellect and our emotions. It is something that cannot be learned or taught. It can only be realized and developed. Since this pure creative drive comes from an inner place, the process of birthing an idea is often hindered and polluted by our intellect and our emotions. Environments that stimulate all five senses enable us to tap into this inner place where the best ideas live. While our senses are being stimulated and engaged, we allow for the ideas to be heard. Yes, there comes a time when we need to convert this idea into a feasible product using our intellect and our emotions. But, we need to find the seed of the idea. And the way to tap into this source is to block out our sensory receptors.

This post is a further explanation to Airports, Coffee & Pavlov’s Dogs.

Have you ever wondered why certain environments, music and even scents inspire you and stimulate creative thought and ideas? To expand on this question even further. Why do we come up with the greatest ideas when we’re not coming up with ideas? When we play, ideas happen.

We’re in a constant cycle of growth and learning. As we move through life, we unconsciously develop ways to make our life more efficient by creating habits and routines. We find shorter ways to get from point A to point B. We develop new systems to get things done. And, we often learn efficiency and fall into habits without thinking. Our learning and growing is never without influence; whether the influence is a person, a story, an idea or an internal drive.

One of the forms of learning is Associative Learning. We often refer to this as Classical Conditioning (yes, the story of Pavlov’s dogs!) In a nutshell, if the brain is presented and conditioned with stimuli that evokes a specific response, then anytime a similar stimuli is presented, the same response is triggered. Over time, our minds develop an association between the stimulus and the response.

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