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DEVELOPING NEW BUSINESS IDEAS108

many people associate idea generation
with the Eureka moment, the sudden
single moment of inspiration

perpetuating the myth Other dramatis personae in the Eureka

series include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose epic poem, Kubla Khan,
appeared to him in a single dream, and Isaac Newton, on whose head
the apple fell, thus inspiring his insight into gravity.

Andrew Palmer, founder of the New Covent Garden Food Company, has
laid recent claim to the Eureka mantle. As his company website puts it:

‘The idea came to us – like so many good ideas – in the bath. Our founder,
Andrew Palmer, was winding down after a day’s sailing and fancied some of
his mother’s delicious home-made soup. Alas, his mother had prepared
salad. The shock set Andrew thinking about why his local supermarket
stocked nothing but tinned or dried soups.’84

While dramatically uplifting, these stories of almost magical inspiration
belie the preparation, introspection, research and analysis which allow
the apparently random Eureka moment to happen. As the French
mathematician, Henri Poincaré, wrote:

‘These sudden inspirations . . . never happen except after some days of
voluntary effort which has appeared absolutely fruitless and whence
nothing seems to have come, where the way taken seems totally astray.
These efforts then have not been as sterile as one thinks: they have set
going the unconscious machine, and without them it would not have moved
and have produced nothing.’85

Or as top golfer Arnold Palmer expressed it more prosaically: ‘The
harder I practise, the luckier I get.’

don’t wait for inspiration Creative ideas are not the inevitable

result of bathing, dreaming or sitting under trees, waiting for the muse
to deign to alight. Creative ideas are more likely to result from pure
hard work and concentration, the 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent
perspiration evoked by Thomas Edison.

The message is that you can, and indeed must, apply divergent and
convergent thinking styles in order to generate creative product, process
and service ideas.