The Remarkably Simple Way to Brainstorm New Business Ideas
By: Jason Weiland
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Creativity, Marketing, Business, Startup

How to Brainstorm Business Ideas

We shouldn’t take a scattershot approach by starting with a murky goal in mind like most of us do. It reminds me of the startup days when clueless heads of every department would sit around a conference table eating bagels and drinking coffee while arguing over the direction a project should take.

According to Professor Ralph Keeney, from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, who wrote a paper about decision analysis, we should break brainstorming up into four steps.

Step 1: Layout the problem

Before you try to come up with solutions, you better know what the problems are. So in the case of coming up with a business idea, you want to outline all the needs and wants that a business should solve.

In the case of my wife and me, our list was simple. The business we start must:

Have low startup costs

Operate in profit within a few months

Be a product, not a service

Be something that both my wife and I could do together

Incorporate our hobbies and interests, so we could enjoy what we were doing

Use the knowledge and experience we already have to ensure the business was successful

Take the pandemic into account, because not every business will work in the new normal we live in now

Have customers already willing to buy

Have low marketing costs

Not be labor-intensive

It may seem like a big list and too much to ask for, but we stayed positive and molded these problems into an image of a solution we wanted in our mind.

Step 2: Identify the objectives of a possible solution

Come up with as much detail as you can about a possible solution to your list of problems, or in our case, needs and wants:

We knew we could save money if we started something that involved a hobby we already had. We could save more if in manufacturing the product could use skills we already possessed and didn’t have to pay someone else to do the work. We would also conduct all business in our home, so we didn’t have to rent another location to do business.

Use our knowledge of local Facebook groups and bartering networks to our advantage instead of paying for marketing. We would use social media instead of advertising or paying for a retail location with lots of foot traffic.

Working from home and including our kids in the business would not only teach them valuable lessons but ensure that we would have time to spend working on our business.

Rely on word of mouth from our family here in the Philippines to get the word out about our product.

We knew we could save a lot of money if we used our heads and thought about what we already had that people around us needed and wanted right now.

Step 3: Find solutions individually

After a lot of talking and going over options, my wife and I went our separate ways and started ruminating. I must have come up with a hundred ideas, but only a few of them were worthwhile.

My wife stressed about the whole thing a lot less than I did, and that is why she came up with the idea. They say “a watched pot never boils,” and if you are always racking your brain about the problem, your mind will never have time to be creative.

Ease up on yourself and forget about the problem for a while. It may be that the solution will pop in your head.

Now, if you are alone in brainstorming, you can stop on this step, but if you are part of a group like we were, now is the time to come together.

Step 4: Work on a solution as a team

After my wife, Flora, dropped the idea we started working together on it. I have been trying for years to get her interested in working on something with me, and all it took was some creative brainstorming to find an idea we both want to do.

When you come together as a group, don’t anchor on one thing too much. In the case of Flora and I, we sent texts back and forth all day, coming up with new ideas to support her main idea, and kept it very loose.

Now, we have a plan that is much better than anything I’ve ever thought of on my own, and we are starting work on building our new business.