storming
We got new gal at work recently, senior el stragety and client relations. She's on fire with biz dev lately and she's been igniting the fire storm of ideas in me as well. I don't typically venture in biz dev really, least not on any official level but since she's been on board her willingness to listen and eagerness to hear me out has resulted in a storm of ideas on my end.
Personally I love it. Maybe calling it biz dev is the wrong word. To me its ideas on possiblilities in a multitude of areas, new biz, future trends, things to come, etc. I like riding that wave really, and more often than not, we all see it coming, so lets talk about it.
Ideas come to me in different ways. Like a song writer they hit you in shower, or while driving or by realization or something a friend says. The net is also becoming a real trend sniffer of tool. What are folks bloggin about? What social network tools are buzzin? Who is hot and what is not and what does that mean? A good surfing session brings all kinds of ideas to the surface. Lately I've been much better about writing them all down, trends, product ideas, and the occasional hilarious note point to boot.
I think about those that surround me, my friends and family, out of that collective how does the pattern breakdown, what is being thought of or consumed or peaking the interest or worried about or discovered.
My father is a great gauge for what's happening in the world of 65+ senior, what's happening there, what are the factors that impact his life, his mundane activies, his energy.. he just bought a hedge trimmer, go talk to him about that. I'm not sure Black&Decker fullly realizes the growing consumer base of hedge trimmers to the 65+ spectrum.. what could be done better for them? When comes to the internet my father is curious and downright furious with how the net works at times, the way technology appears so flawed, to him as a 50 year veteran of human factors engineering.. it really comes across as if he's truly stunned at the problems with computing, how'd they get this way?!
The "normal" gang, is another source of ideas and inspiration. When I talk about "normal" or the group called normal. It refers to an email list set up by Troy one of the el superemo tech heads in the group. Created.. well I dunno how long ago.. but long ago basically and about nine of us or so collectively banter back and forth everyday on. Normal is a massive exchange of ideas, stories, links, arguements, rants, lectures, you name it, it happens on normal. And theres typically, oh about 30-200 messages a day depending on how frisky folks feel.
In normal we're all geeks basically. But theres some good harvesting happening there. Normal covers the gambit of the low fi not so techy folks like me.. heh and the extreme fi folks, troy.. and clint. And then we have the nomadic peoples like nik and mike. And our programmer types bob and todd. - They'll love this i'm sure.
On a persona level they are all very different people. I can't help but to consider them all as invaluable data sets to pull from. Each of them have different motivators, different levels of acceptance or tolerences on technology, brands, perceptions of service etc. Some are clearly early adopters and lead users while others are not but still just as valuable to the food chain.
All of this in one way or another impacts the stream of ideas. Its like connecting the dots, you cant do it all via the web, and you cant do it all via just folks ya know. That whole collective is needed, or at least helps the brief connections develop into a storm.
So factoring all of this lately I've dished up about 10 or so good product ideas or trends to take note. Looking at those 10 I know theres at least 30 more I'm not thinking about. So I dig some more.
Sometimes I go back in time, I go to the web and find perdictions for 2004, in 2003 about where its all headed, either from conference notes or papers folks wrote, or old blog entries. How close were these folks on the mark? Did this idea manifest? What killed this concept? That was a pipedream didnt happen? That other idea happened FAST!
More thoughts and ideas to come.