24 Ideas When You Need Great New Concepts

Do you ever feel that the odds are stacked against you in trying to come up with a great new idea that stands out because every great idea has already been imagined?

An Example of Mining New Ideas from What's Already Out There

We've covered multiple times the benefit of mining ideas already out there for new value. Let's apply those concepts here to imagine how you could generate ideas for a new app that can stand our from the crowd. Here is a mind map with 24 possibilities, along with descriptions of all of them:

• Pick 1 function of the app and focus on doing it better (Focused)
• Figure out what a suite of focused apps would look like and do (Complementary)
• Move the app into a completely new context (Shift)
• Design the app so it would work for the last person you’d ever expect to use it (Off Target)
• Create the app for use in a completely different industry (Repurpose)
• Combine features from across multiple apps in a new way (Aggregate)
• Grab functions from unrelated apps and make them work together (Integrate)
• Partner with the app creator to find new markets for what’s already developed (Re-market)
• Bundle multiple apps into one interface (Combine)
• Design an app users can modify to better suit their needs (User involvement)
• Create a customizable app (Variability)
• Do to the opposite of all the apps in your category (Contrary)
• Introduce nostalgia into the app (Historical)
• Make the app work on a less popular platform (Niche)
• Incredibly simplify the app (Simplify)
• Remove options from the app to make it more streamlined (Streamline)
• Use the most important feature and develop multiple ways for the app to handle it (Diversity)
• Make the app more complex through richer functionality and features (Robust)
• Create a more sophisticated version of the app (Sophistication)
• Deliver the benefits the app offers in a better way (Improve)
• Add more benefits in speed, thoroughness, versatility to the app (Broaden)
• Leapfrog 2 or 3 generations of the app (Leapfrog)
• Deliver the most outrageous benefit possible through the app (Extreme)
• Specifically design the app to destabilize an industry you’re not in right now (Destabilize)

Who knows if all these are stellar ideas? Most likely they aren’t all stellar ideas. But all these ideas have the possibility for more exploration if you are trying to generate a great new idea that is really something different.

24 Ideas for You

If you’re working on something other than an app where these twenty-four ideas might not quite fit, you can still use the twenty-four transformers in parentheses to play around with your run of the mill ideas to put some new life into them:

1. Focused
2. Complementary
3. Shift
4. Off Target
5. Repurpose
6. Aggregate
7. Integrate
8. Re-market
9. Combine
10. User involvement
11. Variability
12. Contrary
13. Historical
14. Niche
15. Simplify
16. Streamline
17. Diversity
18. Robust
19. Sophistication
20. Improve
21. Broaden
22. Leapfrog
23. Extreme
24. Destabilize

24 Ideas for Me?

Let us know how these twenty-four transformers work for you! – Mike Brown