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Written by: Susan Marshall
You have your business, but maybe you need a little inspiration. Something to fire you back up and fuel some new ideas. Or maybe you’re looking to improve your current product offering by adding more features, creating a more robust platform, or changing the entire product altogether. Whatever it is that you’re looking for inspiration in, there are several places you should always start. Inc. Magazine (@Inc) gives some practical advice for businesses to get inspiration. Here, we list some of our favorites:
Listen to People You Know
Get customer feedback: Listen to customers and create products and services that give them more of what they like and/or remove what they dislike.
Listen to front-line employees: The workers who manufacture the widgets, interact with customers and so on see what takes too long to accomplish, what is too expensive, what causes problems. Talk to those workers, or even do those jobs yourself.
Look at What’s Bugging You
Ideas for startups often begin with a problem that needs to be solved. And they don’t usually come while you’re sitting around sipping coffee and contemplating life. They tend to reveal themselves while you’re hard at work on something else.
Be Present in Life
Start your brainstorming with problems that you are personally invested in. Building a business is hard as hell and takes the kind of relentless dedication that comes from personal passion.
Also, most businesspeople tend to ignore our creative side until we really need it. Making sure that your life has a balance of the arts is a great way to stay engaged creatively.
Attack Practical Problems
Make a note whenever you encounter a service or a customer experience that frustrates you, or wish you had a product that met your needs that you can’t find anywhere. Then ask yourself, is this a problem I could solve? And how much time and money would it take to test my idea?
Head into Weird Places
For entrepreneurs to stretch their brains, they should seek out the unusual. For instance, Talk to weird people. Striking up conversations with people who are different from you can be powerful.
Walk in weird places. Take walks in hidden suburban neighborhoods, department stores, community colleges. When you’re walking with no purpose but walking, you see things in fresh ways, because you have the luxury of being in the present.
Be Prepared to Shift Gears
Entrepreneurs need to understand two things. For one thing, their first (or second or third) idea is often not the real opportunity. In fact, it might stink. They have to be on the lookout for why it stinks and be willing to shift course. But they also need to understand that even if their idea has problems, there’s often a good opportunity buried within it. They need to talk to people and continue tweaking and transforming it. In the process, they encounter setbacks, rethink their approach, try again and redefine what they’re doing.