Ok, I may catch some flak for this, but... that is exactly the reason I domain squat on a pile of domains. A few years ago I went through a phase where anytime I'd come up with a seemingly cool name, I'd register the domain (if available) and just sit on it... so I don't "domain squat" to make money on ads or anything (although I did play around a little with trying to monetize some otherwise idle domains, but I never put much effort into it), but rather to reserve the domain for myself for potential future use.

With that said, when I was looking for a company name for a consulting business a year or so ago, I threw my favorite one out to a friend of mine for feedback, and he absolutely hated it. So I sent him a list of my favorite 5-10 out the domains I had, and one jumped out at him as "oh yeah, that's perfect." After thinking about it for a while I decided he was right, so I went with it (that one had been my 2nd favorite to begin with). And now I'm actually reusing it as I move into doing a product. It's just the company name though, now naming individual products is going to be the bigger challenge.

Of course if you need a name right now none of this helps... all I can say is generic crap like "think outside the box." Put together combinations of words that don't seem to make sense at first and play around with them. Borrow phrases from the top news headlines of the day and see if those words somehow combine to form something useful. Take a word that has something to do with what your status does, and start attaching other words in front of or behind it, until one combo makes you go "oooh."

For example... If you were doing a "grid computing" startup, take the word "grid" and start going:

gridstart
gridcurve
gridfeed
gridbox
gridblox
gridwave
gridcloud
antigrid
gridhacker
gridlog
...
...
...

And if all else fails, you could explore some of the alternative TLDs if the ".com" is taken. Some feel kinda ghetto for some reason (like .biz... I doubt I'd ever use a .biz for anything) but some alt tlds are actually kinda cool... .fm, .io, .tv and a few others seem somewhat popular.

Like, .io feels kinda right for something geeky and computer related... so if you were doing the grid computing startup, maybe "gridcomputing.io" "io" seems to imply a sort of techie'ish flavor (even thought the TLD actually stands for Indian Ocean or something like that).

Another last ditch thing would be trying to buy a domain that's taken. Not every taken domain costs a bazillion dollars to acquire. And if you establish a trademark on the name successfully, you may be able to appeal to ICANN and get a squatted on domain anyway. Not sure exactly how that works, but it might be worth researching.

Edit: Another approach that might help... pick a theme, and google around that theme for lists of important "things." For example... I was looking to name a series of related open-source projects recently, so I picked "lighthouses" as the theme (and this ties into the company name mentioned above), so I started looking for lists of "famous lighthouses" and "lighthouse terminology" and finally came up with ScrewPile (no, not a pr0n term, it refers to a type of lighthouse), Neddick (reference to a famous lighthouse), Quoddy (again, a particular lighthouse) and Heceta (and yet another well known lighthouse).