When have you actually had an innovating idea? An innovative idea is one that comes from ‘no-where’ and is ‘now-here’. Einstein said that you can’t solve problems from the same mind that created the problem to begin with. A friend of mine sold his business a few years ago for $350 million dollars to an aerospace company. I met him while we both were getting our black belts in Tae Kwon Do and I once asked him while we were drinking coffee one day how he developed his good ideas.

I was thinking that maybe brain storming sessions at work or something like this would have been the way he generated ideas. However, he said that he was allergic to brainstorming. He stayed away from it like the plague and generally thought it was a waste of his company’s time. Innovation and true creativity he explained to me came from going into his quiet basement and doodling on notebooks until he had ideas that were innovative and would bring real change and competitive advantage to his company. He would go into his quiet space and doodle, draw, and sketch technical architecture and design ideas that were going to be disruptive solutions in the aerospace industry. Eventually, his creativity became a threat to his competitors so they silenced him by acquiring his company.

Can you generate your own ideas, innovative ones, solutions to real business problems? You can! What is your routine to incorporate your own idea generation into your life? Do you depend on group think alone or are you leveraging the power of your knowledge and understanding of Technology and Business to bring great ideas to the table?