How to Inspire Outstanding Ideas

Preface

Have you ever wondered where great ideas come from? Have you ever wished you could come up with remarkable new solutions to use in your work and personal life? If so, this book is for you.

Everybody loves great ideas, especially ones that are practically useful and vividly unique. To improve something, create something brand new, or deal with something challenging, people look for brilliant ideas to help them achieve their goals. These ideas can take the form of insightful innovation, shrewd business decisions, or solutions to tough problems we encounter every day.  Quite often, a person faces a problem for which either an existing solution isn’t good enough or there just isn’t any solution available. Obviously, finding your great idea is the crucial first step to get the job done in these situations (even though creating the idea may be a very small portion of the whole process of reaching a goal). Without the idea, you can’t even begin the process of solving your problem.

I have introduced a four-step method to local communities and professional groups that cultivates inspiration for good ideas in recent years. The four-step method is a core process for anyone searching for an effective method to make generating new ideas much easier. These four steps are:

Step 1: Study examples involving outstanding ideas.

Step 2: Extract generalized idea-inspiring approaches.

Step 3: Make a checklist of the generalized approaches.

Step 4: Inspect how your needs apply to the checklist.

The four-step method is called the “SEMI method” after the first letter of each step: Study, Extract, Make and Inspect. As I’ve presented the SEMI method to audiences over the years, I have received very positive feedback about it. People have told me that they were able to apply the method in their work and personal lives almost immediately.

I have conducted a study in my spare time for decades to discover whether there is a finite number of such generalized approaches for inspiring wonderful ideas and, if so, to identify them. I have collected several thousand example cases containing inconspicuous, yet amazing, ideas and solutions for the study. After a detailed analysis of these cases, I have discovered some interesting basic insights.

An idea is usually deemed great when the creator first expresses the idea and others immediately understand its impact, although none of them thought of it themselves. They highly value the idea and the effort put into it by the creator. However, that doesn’t mean that the idea creator is necessarily smarter than everyone else. It could just be that the idea creator happened to have thought about something and discover his idea in those particular circumstances, and it’s very possible that a different person in the same group could generate a new great idea in other circumstances.

Often there are two major barriers preventing us from creating great ideas: (1) inadvertently overlooking aspects of situations that we should have considered, and (2) knowingly avoiding certain aspects of situations that we could have considered.

After having thoroughly studied thousands of cases, I discovered that the number of fundamental techniques used during the processes of generating great ideas is limited, and they stem from finding easily overlooked and/or intentionally avoided aspects of the situation. So far, the study has identified a total of thirty such techniques that encompass all the thinking processes contained in the entire collection of cases, and each case can be clearly explained using one or more of the approaches. The thirty generalized, idea-inspiring approaches are built from the two fundamental discoveries that form the foundation of this book.

The thirty approaches can be broken down into six major categories: Expand the Footprint, Be Alert for Relationships, Examine Its Evolution, Keep a Balance in Mind, Check Other Easily Overlooked Aspects, and Include Areas People May Try to Avoid. The first five categories present techniques to uncover easily overlooked aspects of a situation, and the last category addresses how to identify any otherwise intentionally excluded aspects.

A condensation of all these approaches and their various aspects are presented in a concise summary at the end of the book. The Grand Checklist is an easy-to-use toolbox for users. After reading this book, if you want to create a brilliant idea, you may want to jump directly to the fourth step of the SEMI method and simply match your goal with the appropriate approaches in the Grand Checklist. With the Grand Checklist at hand, you can avoid overlooking any important aspect of a situation when pursuing great ideas or solutions.

People aspire to conceive wonderful new ideas, but often ask: “How do I actually discover a great new idea?” The focus of this book is to primarily answer this long-standing question of “How?” and to present highly effective methods that directly enable you to produce your own amazing ideas. The book is not intended to answer questions of how to build an idea-friendly environment or how to turn an idea into reality—these areas have been addressed by many other books on idea creation. Instead, this book is firmly focused on giving anyone a complete set of practical techniques for incubating outstanding ideas. Equipped with the approaches provided in this book, readers will be able to immediately start generating amazing new ideas.

This book makes the thirty idea-inspiring approaches easy to understand by including nearly two hundred fascinating examples. These examples are intended to help you readily grasp the concepts behind the techniques and reinforce your thinking process when applying the techniques to real-world situations. Innovative thinking can be applied to almost any field of endeavor and, consequently, this book also reflects a broad spectrum of areas where the techniques can be used.

I sincerely believe that this book will provide a major boost in your ability to improve what may already exist, create something completely new, or resolve challenging problems—no matter who you are or what you want to accomplish.

TJ Xia, PhD

Richardson, Texas

August 2017

tjxia@yahoo.com