Perhaps, you might have heard hundreds of inspirational stories about curios entrepreneurs who have turned their self-generated business concepts into million-dollar companies.
The question which knocks our minds is how do these people come up with such great and innovative business ideas? Alright! let’s reveal some important sources of innovation in this valuable post:
FEELING THE PAIN OF PEOPLE
It simply means looking around and listening to the complaints of your people. The complaints of people are the greatest sources for innovative business ideas. The innovators feel the pain of their people and then try to come up with suitable solutions. Who doesn’t know James watt’s story of the steam engine?
When the United Kingdom was flooded with coal mines, it had a negative impact on health and the environment. James watt felt this pain and hence started experimenting on a steam engine. Finally, with his successful invention, he succeeded in removing out the maximum complaints of his people.
SENSING THE WAVE
Sensing the trends of your economy is yet another source of innovative business ideas. Let’s clear this metaphor with a story of Sherpalo ventures. It actually is a venture fund business in India started by K.Ram Shriram.
He is among the first investors of Google and owns around 900,000 shares of Google. For the past seven years, his firm has been involved in investing money in Indian start-up companies such as naukri.com, InMobi, Green dust, etc.
When asked about how does he select companies for investing? What he says is that “we fundamentally believe in spotting trends in an economy and backing up startups that address those trends”. It simply implies, when young educated people of India were trying to search for jobs, naukri.com sensed out this trend or wave and thus created one of the largest Indian job portals.
SEEING THE WASTE AROUND
Seeing the waste is also the greatest source of innovation. Everybody in business sees waste of paper, material, time, etc around. An engineer in SAP lab India observed that a lot of energy was getting wasted when employees go for coffee breaks and forget to switch off their monitors.
He devised a small microcontroller underneath the cup which sends a signal to the PC for getting automatically off when the mug was lifted up. This idea was so simple that it was implemented in the whole organization. This thinking of removing waste from your business is called seeing the waste.
