Ideation is harder than it looks. Not because your team lacks intelligence or creativity — but because good ideas rarely appear on demand. They emerge from the collision of knowledge, experience, and a deliberate shift in perspective. Ask a room of people to "come up with ideas" and you will mostly get variations of what already exists.
The good news is that ideation is a skill, not a talent. And like any skill, it improves with the right tools and deliberate practice.
After seven years running innovation programs inside large organisations, I have seen which approaches consistently unlock genuinely new thinking — and which ones produce another round of incremental improvements dressed up as innovation. The six approaches below are the ones worth keeping in your toolkit, each with a real company example of what it looks like when it works.
Why Ideas Do Not Come From Nowhere
Before the approaches, a useful mental model: ideas are not formed in a vacuum. They emerge from the intersection of things you already know. The more diverse your inputs — industries, disciplines, business models, customer types — the more intersection points you have, and the more likely something genuinely new will surface.
This is why multidisciplinary teams tend to out-ideate homogeneous ones. And why the approaches below all work by deliberately importing a perspective your team does not currently hold.
6 Structured Approaches to Finding Big Business Ideas
Extreme User Thinking
Most organisations design for their average customer. The problem with average is that it produces average solutions — products that are acceptable to most people and genuinely useful to very few.
Extreme user thinking flips this. Instead of designing for the middle of your customer distribution, you study the edges: the power users who push your product to its limits, the novices who find it impenetrable, the people with accessibility needs that your standard design does not accommodate. When you solve for an extreme, you often discover solutions that work better for everyone.
Example — Superhuman
Rather than competing for average email users, Superhuman focused entirely on power users who found mainstream email clients too slow and too cluttered. By solving the problem at the extreme, they built a product that commands a premium price point and created a category of its own.
Opposite Thinking
We are all products of our environments. The assumptions baked into an industry — how distribution works, what the customer experience looks like, where the cost sits — become invisible over time. Nobody questions them because everyone accepted them as givens long ago.
Opposite thinking forces you to question those assumptions by asking: what would it look like if we did the exact opposite?
Example — Cloud Kitchens
Every assumption about running a successful restaurant — prime location, high foot traffic, dine-in experience — was flipped. The result was a model that removed the highest costs in the industry and redirected that investment into food quality, arriving just as delivery demand was accelerating.
Analogy Thinking
Every industry has solved problems that other industries have not thought to apply. A business model that is mature and proven in one sector can be genuinely disruptive when transplanted into another. The key skill is abstraction — identifying the underlying structure of a model, not just its surface features.
Example — Swapfiets
The SaaS subscription model was well established in software. Swapfiets asked whether the same model could work for bicycle ownership. Monthly fee, working bike guaranteed, repairs included. A model already proven in one context, applied with precision to another.
Old Process, New Technology Thinking
Much of the innovation of the past two decades has followed a simple pattern: take a process that existed in the physical or analogue world, and rebuild it using technology that now makes it dramatically faster, cheaper, or more accessible. This approach is particularly powerful because it does not require inventing new customer behaviours — the underlying need is already established.
Example — Netflix
The underlying customer need — access to film and television entertainment at home — was not new. Netflix asked what it would look like if that process were rebuilt first around postal delivery, then around internet streaming, as each technology became viable at scale.
Direct Copycat Thinking
This one makes people uncomfortable, but it deserves to be said plainly: originality is not a competitive advantage. Execution is. A business model that is proven in one geography, market segment, or customer context is a lower-risk starting point than a completely novel idea.
Example — Red Bull
The energy drink category already existed in Thailand when Dietrich Mateschitz encountered it. He did not invent the product. He identified that the model could work in a different market, invested in repositioning and marketing, and built one of the most recognisable consumer brands in the world.
Key Asset Thinking
Large organisations sit on assets they do not fully utilise — proprietary data, internal tools, distribution networks, manufacturing capabilities, customer relationships, regulatory licences. The question to ask is not "what business do we want to build?" but "what do we already have that someone else would pay for?"
Example — Slack
Slack began as an internal communication tool built by a gaming company for its own team. When the game itself failed, the team recognised that the tool they had built had independent market value. What started as operational infrastructure became a product worth over $16 billion.
From Ideas to Decisions
These six approaches will give your team more and better ideas to work with. But idea generation is only the first part of the innovation challenge. The harder part is deciding which ideas are worth pursuing.
If your pipeline is full but your decision-making process is not keeping up, our free Innovation Go/No-Go Scorecard gives you a framework for evaluating any opportunity across seven dimensions in twenty minutes.
Frequently Asked Questions
The most reliable method is structured perspective-shifting — deliberately adopting a viewpoint your team does not currently hold. The six approaches in this article each work by importing a different lens: the extreme user, the opposite assumption, the analogy from another industry, the new technology applied to an old process, the proven model from another market, or the underutilised asset you already own.
Two reasons. First, corporate environments reward consistency and optimise for existing operations — the culture actively works against the divergent thinking that ideation requires. Second, most ideation sessions are not structured. A ninety-minute workshop with no specific lens or constraint produces incremental variations of what already exists.
Extreme user thinking is an ideation approach that focuses on the edges of your customer population rather than the average. By studying users with the most demanding needs, the most significant constraints, or the most unusual use cases, innovation teams often uncover solutions that serve everyone better.
Analogy thinking is the practice of identifying business models, operational approaches, or technologies that are proven in one industry and asking whether they could be applied in another. The key is abstraction — understanding the underlying logic of a model, not just its surface features.
Idea quality is not enough on its own. An idea worth pursuing needs a validated problem behind it, a credible path to the customer, a named owner with real authority, and the ability to generate a signal in a reasonable timeframe. Our free Innovation Go/No-Go Scorecard walks you through exactly these dimensions.