Organic ↔ Inorganic. While organic ideas are solutions to problems you noticed in your own life, inorganic ideas are related to other people’s problems.

Bottom-up ↔ Top-down. When you start only with a category in mind, you’re following a top-down approach, while if your ideation efforts start at some smaller scale you’re doing bottom-up ideation.

Organic, Bottom-Up Ideation. (“Scratch your own itch”)
Organic, Top-Down Ideation. (“Live in the future, then build what’s missing”)
Inorganic, Bottom-Up Ideation. (“Idea extraction”)
Inorganic, Top-Up Ideation. (“Idea safaris”)

“Customers don’t pay for ideas; they pay for their problems to be solved.” - Nathan Barry

Focusing on ideas is dangerous because it often leads to clever products that no one wants.

the best ideas are often things that you notice rather than things that you purposefully come up with during a brainstorming session.

The biggest advantage of organic, bottom up ideation is that you’re an expert on your own problems and hence in an ideal position to navigate the corresponding idea maze.

if your life is more mundane, the ideas you’ll be able to come up with organically will be less promising.

An obvious solution to the “boring life”-problem is to start living a more interesting life and being more curious.

An interesting method to find industries and professions you could start to immerse yourself in is Pamela Slim’s month-long ideation exercise. Each day you write down in a notebook how you respond to different things that occur in your life.

As with Pamela Slim’s exercise, curiosity overload allows you to find out what kind of ideas get you excited. Moreover, it’s very likely that you stumble upon interesting inefficiencies and suboptimal processes.

follow Paul Graham’s advice: “Look for smart people and hard problems. Smart people tend to clump together, and if you can find such a clump, it’s probably worthwhile to join it.”

Everyone becomes to some extent numb to the pain they experience in their daily lives.

if you ask the wrong kind of questions, the answers you’re getting will either be not very helpful or even lead you astray.

ask them: “What have you already tried to solve it?” If the answer is: “Nothing.” the problem is not painful enough.

you should pay special attention to phrases that express pain or frustration since these could be promising starting points for new products. This method is often called a “sales safari”

A solid ideation system consists of an ideation habit, an idea inbox (storage of all ideas), and a “meat grinder” (process consisting of evaluation and validation steps) that allows you to decide what ideas are worth excecuting on.

In the spirit of “dollarizing your time” or “setting an aspirational hourly rate”, almost everything else should be outsourced.