Written by: Federico Pinizzotto, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Have you ever wondered where an idea comes from? All of us have had one idea that seemed more or less brilliant at least once in our lives, but where did this infinite process of connections that led you to create an idea arise? I have asked this myself many, many times. It all started about 10 years ago when I used to live in Miami where I started working as a manager for some wellness companies. It is no coincidence that I began to ask myself seriously during that period of my life but we will come back to this later.
I think we can define an "idea" as any theoretical or practical result of a complicated process of conscious or unconscious connections on the part of our thinking.
The question we ask ourselves now is what may have caused this complicated process that led us to reach an idea.
It is often thought that great ideas are only the result of particularly brilliant minds but is it really as seen in a common imagination, or can we connect them to certain processes and conditions that were activated, voluntarily or involuntarily, before the achievement of this intuition?
The human being is a creature with intelligence and an incredible ability to react to direct or indirect stimuli. Whenever we learn, read or see something new, our brain creates new connections to process the information just received and try to understand it; therefore, a process of voluntary and involuntary understanding of the stimulus begins. The best-known processes to which we often attribute the ability to make us produce new and great ideas are the study of the subject on which we would like to produce a new intuition, the readings or information obtained through the media to learn as much as possible on a given topic, but are they the only factors that lead us to reach our goal and therefore to a new idea? To answer this question, we must take a step back in the history of human evolution.
Most of the great ideas of innovation happened almost by chance or rather during periods in which we weren't actively focusing on achieving them. Some of the brightest minds in history, among which certainly Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Edison stand out, took naps for 20 minutes at a time to allow the brain to rest and stop focusing on a single topic. This is due to a mechanism by which the brain can "detach" from the subject, using relaxation or distraction to create new and unique connections, and resume and enhance cognitive, coordinating, and creative processes. Distraction from the topic helps the achievement of new ideas. Another very powerful catalyst of ideas is the network, and I am not referring to the web but to the network as a connection between various individuals. Sharing instead, the exaggerated protection of one's ideas can allow them to be infected by those of others to create new versions that are always better than the previous ones, with a broader vision.
In this, the big cities can be very helpful. Here, we return to my initial preface in describing Miami as the triggering city in my constant request about the origin of ideas.
A large city offers numerous possibilities, including connections with various people of different origins, cultures, experiences, thoughts, and occupations.
The greatest advances in history, as well as the greatest ideas, have been produced within a fluid network or a community of people. In an environment of this type, your original thought or your ideas can undergo what I like to define as a "pleasant contagion," that is to join in points of reflection that we, or our interlocutors, had not thought to modify, improve and enrich our cognitive processes by creating new additional links that will be fundamental in our achievement of a great idea.
We now come to the central point of this reflection, namely how to create a winning idea applied to the business. We have therefore seen where a great idea can originate and how we can facilitate this process, but what is missing to bring all this within a business project or a start-up?
To apply what has been said to a business model and make it so successful or innovative, we must try to combine all the factors we have seen previously. We can therefore summarize them as follows:
Curiosity and information: Get informed, get informed, and again get informed. Curiosity is the engine of our brain and our thoughts, cultivating passions and interests and always deepening them. Also, try to always keep yourself informed about what surrounds you, about what is happening in the world, and always ask yourself questions instead of giving everything as true without going deeper. Unleash and cultivate your curiosity, it is still one of the greatest gifts we are equipped with.
Study: Whatever the sector of reference is, you must try to know it to the best of your ability, read articles, study books, try to learn from more experienced people, and learn like a sponge everything that they can transmit to you, but always and in any case with a little part of you that has to question it, to guarantee you that level of curiosity that will keep stimulating you to always deepen. Knowledge of a topic and curiosity can make you discover gaps, deficiencies, or improvements in a certain area that your idea could remedy.
Leisure and rest: As previously mentioned, the brain reacts better to creating new connections and creative ideas if it is given time to distract itself voluntarily. Try to cultivate a hobby, play sports, and go out. In short, have fun voluntarily. Give your brain time to rest so you can allow it to thank you by providing you with new energy and connections.
Seek a fluid network: If you have the opportunity, travel as much as possible or try to move to a big city to get to know as many people, realities, cultures, and systems as possible. Let yourself be infected by new ways of seeing and reasoning.
Sharing: Sharing your ideas helps to have further improvements that can be given to us by our interlocutors. Exchanges of opinions and feedback can also help you improve them more. Remember that two or more people with an incomplete idea joining together can create a great idea.
Furthermore, talking and discussing with other people can help you validate your idea or your business model (if you are already in the next step), you can understand the critical issues, gaps, weaknesses, the real interest of the market, and so on. This will represent your first market survey, so share your thoughts with as many people as possible.
Once this first survey has been done, based on the response collected from people external to your idea but still potential users of your product or service, you can confirm the validity of your model or perform pivots, modifications, increases, and/or variations to the business idea to create a further improved version and, above all, I will be partially validated.
Once these points have been put in order, we can go on and try to answer the fateful and most important question in the final phase of creating an idea. What is the need or problem that I can solve with this idea?
If you can answer this question, you will finally have found what you are looking for, an idea, perhaps a great idea that may be worth pursuing.
I conclude by telling you that the ideas are the result of a will on our part to seek them, but they cannot exist without the involuntary part of connections resulting from various activities complementary to the mere concentration on the idea itself.
Federico Pinizzotto, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Federico Pinizzotto is a professional startupper, former entrepreneur and strategic advisor for various companies and funds. A bad injury during his period in the airforce forced him to change the direction of his life. He began to study nutrition and management. He started to combine the personalization, derived from his career in coaching, to the business counseling and advisory derived from his experience and professional studies. He is now the founder and CEO of Wellness & Medicine Academy, one of the most fast growing company in the medical field, Co-founder and CEO of Livrea Movement . His mission: help startupper and entrepreneurs to create game changer businesses.
