How do past and present great inventors and creative greats like Thomas Edison, David Ogilvy and Seth Godin come up with their strokes of genius?

How do they endlessly churn out good ideas – simple but powerful solutions to nagging problems that no one saw in the first place –with seemingly little effort?

“Whatever you think, think the opposite,” says the title of Paul Arden’s timeless tome on the process of ideation, or idea generation. It is advice like this that many people use to prod their minds into venturing boldly into previously unexplored perspectives.

That’s what a good idea will do: It not only brings a solution to the table, but like the light bulb and the telephone, it changes our relationship to the problem entirely, and opens a vast array of possibilities.

Whatever You Think, Think Everything

Ideas, says Mary Jaksch, can be found everywhere. That’s why one of the best tools you can have is an “everything book,” which serves to capture any ideas that suddenly spring into your mind. The intention is to catch all your ideas in one place before they vanish.

Apart from the occasional brilliant spark, your book may mostly be filled with unremarkable scribbles. However, before long, you will have collected a rich repository of thoughts, each a possible launching pad for triggering ideas during a brainstorming session.

Think Alternatives: The Blue Ocean Factor

In W. Chan Kim’s and Renée Mauborgne’s seminal work, “Blue Ocean Strategy,” the authors identified how certain wildly successful companies made their competition irrelevant by bringing never-before-seen ideas into the marketplace. Part of these companies’ success involved looking across alternative industries, markets, target consumers and business strategies to form a unique service or product offering.

Simply put, you can generate new ideas by combining ideas from previously unconnected concepts, which will open new opportunities and avenues.

Think in Quantity to Get Quality

Luciano Passuello of Litemind says that new ideas are connections to previous, established ideas. The best method then for idea generation is to develop an “idea abundance” mindset. Keep having ideas – any ideas, as many of them as possible, anywhere and anytime – because quantity is one way to achieve quality.

Think in the Right Setting

Zenhabits has a long list of tips to set your mind in the right mood for ideation, such as having fun and freeing your mind from constraints.

If “breaking free from constraints” sounds too abstract, try the Directors Bureau Special Projects’ Idea Generator, which randomly strings three words together in unique and often humorous combinations. At the very least, it’s good comic relief!

How to Generate Ideas? Just Think.

You might be looking for the next big idea for a viral campaign, or you might be looking for a fresh angle to a current project stuck in limbo, or maybe you’re just looking to contribute at your division’s next brainstorming session. The best thing you can do is to keep looking for that big idea, keeping in mind what we’ve just discussed.

With these tips on how to generate ideas, you’ll have your brilliant idea in no time.

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