I think most good ideas come from "playing" with all sorts of things.
For example, I just had an excellent business idea. Unfortunately I can't say what it is (sorry), but it came to me while a friend was cleaning out his huge collection of business cards, and a started screwing around with the throwaways and noticed something interesting. I wasn't trying to invent a business. I was just ****ing around with some business cards, and boom. I don't think anyone every had an idea staring at a wall.
In my experience ALL ideas come from either that process or what I call the engineering/analytic process which uses very straight forward methods - state the problem, list all possible solutions and related ideas, explore/analyze each one, take the best - that sort of stuff.
The "play" process is good for coming up with innovative ideas. The "engineering" process is good for forcing yourself to accept ideas that you already knew about, but had some aversion to even though they're really best.
|