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1074 : STEP TWO – GENERATING NEW IDEAS

racket, Head reached his final design. Head’s oversized racket offered
much greater stability for the off-centre shots which are the hallmark of
the true amateur. The hugely enlarged ‘sweet spot’ of the racket
improved the performance of rank amateurs to such an extent that
initially some professionals would not use the product on the grounds
that it was an admission of technical weakness. Nevertheless, the
commercial power of the patent which covered the invention led one
competitor to observe acidly that it was akin to securing a patent on a
size nine shoe.

So important are Howard Head’s entrepreneurial achievements that his
first metal skis and his Prince Classic racket are now permanently
displayed at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington.

Eureka? As with Howard Head spotting that the tennis racket

market presented an analogy to the skiing market, this second step
seeks to generate a range of alternative ideas which can capitalise on
the business opportunity defined and redefined by the first step.

It may well involve creating ideas way beyond your original concept.
Thomas Edison, for example, went beyond the development of a
practical and affordable light bulb to create an entire infrastructure for
the electrical industry. As we shall see in the case study at the end of
this chapter, Edison repeated the same feat within what was to become
the recording industry, widening from the development of the
phonograph to the creation of an industry infrastructure.

This step is one of the most exciting because it is when the ideas which
you were seeking start to emerge. Many people associate idea
generation with the Eureka moment, the sudden single moment of
inspiration beloved of myth. Archimedes heads the bill of these
dramatic moments. He took a bath as a refuge from wrestling with the
problem of how to establish whether a gold crown was counterfeit. The
experience of bathing led him to the analogical insight that he could
use water displacement to measure the cubic area of the gold crown.
This would allow the correct weight of the crown to be calculated as if
it were pure gold and then compared against the crown’s actual weight.
‘Eureka – I have it!’ he shouted as he leapt out of the bath.