How often do you exercise your creative muscle?
In a recent meeting with an undergraduate student from NC State, he wanted to pick my brain about entrepreneurship. He asked lots of hard questions and I admired his initiative to reach out after my recent lecture to his class.
“How do you find entrepreneurial opportunities?”
What a great question.
I offered the followed advice to him during our meeting.
- You need to become a keen observer noticing things among specific communities. When you sit in a coffee shop and see almost every young woman wearing boots – what does that tell you about fashion, style and perhaps an opportunity? Is there an opportunity for someone to focus a business on boot repair, boot swapping or boot subscriptions?
- If you explore a community you know well and are part of, what can you see as pain points and problems that they face? By being agnostic toward a solution, start with both understanding and feeling the pain of the problem. If you are part of a community, what ideas could evolve? A parent in California started a toy store for children who are on the autistic spectrum because their son is autistic. They couldn’t find the kinds of toys that felt would inspire their child so they decided to solve that problem with a business serving the community of family and friends who know autistic kids.
- Every day, write down at least one business idea. It is great practice to get your entrepreneurial juices flowing even if the idea is silly, stupid or impractical. By journaling the idea, it gets you observing, noticing and thinking how you might solve problems through a business. In committing ideas to paper, you work out that creative muscle just like taking a walk each day keeps you in shape.
- Adopt an anthropologist mindset, watching a culture, a community, a group of people and try to learn the mechanism of how they operate. Insights from observation allow you to form a hypothesis, to begin the thought process toward entrepreneurial opportunity.
- What jobs are people trying to accomplish? Businesses that fail don’t solve problems for customers that are meaningful. Notice problems. Observe complexity. Find inconveniences. Do all of these BEFORE you create a product or service. Entrepreneurs tend to notice problems first before the create solutions.
I have been exercising my creative muscle for years. Every day, I try to find one idea for a new business and write it down. Yesterday’s idea combined restaurants and theater.
I wondered what it might be like to be able to go to a restaurant and get to have dinner with an actor playing a historical figure.
I’d like a table for four and could Steve Jobs join us? The menu would include a list of historical actors who could join your party.
You could have dinner with Alexander Hamilton, Julia Child or Willie Mays. The opportunity to mash together these two worlds, theater and restaurants were sparked by a game my family always plays at dinner, particularly when we have someone new joining us. We call it the dinner question, and it revolves around the three people you’d like to have dinner with, living or dead, real or imagine, from the past, present or future.
What are you noticing about a community you are part of or have a curiosity about? Are you recording those observations and ideas somewhere where you can keep track of the ideas?
How are you exercising your creative entrepreneurial muscle?
Need help finding new directions and paths for growth? Perhaps an indepedent, outsider’s view can help provide a fresh roadmap toward growth and increased sales. Let’s talk. 919 720 0995.
– http://www.whitehouse.gov/photogallery/working-with-canada/
