Good ideas, for me, come more from linking things than from random inspiration - take two boring, uninteresting facts - say, the fact that a piece of metal moving through a magnetic field generates an electric charge, and the fact that although Jupiter's satellite lack magnetic fields they get magnetized as they orbit Jupiter - and you can develop this into an interesting scifi idea, which has consequences for the world design itself (does the world only become magnetized at specific times? Does this effect electricity generation on the world? Are there other ways to generate power? etc).
Anyhoo, whether or not idea generation is a 'death knell' in fiction depends on what you're writing - maybe in literary fiction that's important, but genre fiction is more about entertainment. If you look at epic fantasy for example you'll see dozens of books with the same core ideas as Lord of the Rings, but people keep buying them because they read for character growth more than intellectual curiosity. So I'd say just write - Nanowrimo's coming up, so choose a junk idea, build it into an outline, and get writing (Hell, I'm writing about zombies and robots).
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