antipattern

Idea Engineering is the art and science of developing an idea. It is the process an entrepreneur follows to develop an idea that can change the behavior of humans or humanity.

Today, idea engineering is primarily an art, and not much of a science, if at all. If it was more of a science, we would see much less failure in early stage ventures.

Ideas typically start out mediocre and programmed to fail. By iterating on the idea, the idea can be improved and strengthened, until it becomes something that will change the behavior of people. And just like therapy creates better humans, idea therapy creates better ideas.

A core principle of idea engineering and idea therapy is how to influence behavior via emotions.

No emotion. No change. No business.

The process is to identify things that people love, hate, or generally experience strongly either positively or negatively, and combine it with endeavors that either influence time or money.

Of course, entrepreneurs have been doing things like this implicitly for ages. You find a strong pain point and solve it. But the reality is that finding pain points in the hyper competitive world is not that easy any more – practically wherever you look, you will find solutions.

So as an entrepreneur you have to more clever in how to combine behavior changes and emotions together, in multiple layers, through a process called stacking. This creates a practically infinite catalog of ideas that can be individually explored. Some of the combinations will truly be innovative, and may develop into a healthy business. Exploring the combinations and changing the configuration of the idea is the idea therapy component of it.

Lets look at an example how stacking works. It is sort of like building a cake consisting of various layers that either involve emotions or behaviors.

Lets start with a layer of negative emotion. You have a long commute to work everyday, and you essentially have a lot of time on your hands. It is essentially unproductive time.

Lets stack another layer of negativity top of that. You are unhappy at work. So you are considering a new job, but you don't want to spend a lot of time on it. You are casually looking.

I suspect that lots of people fall in this category – in a later stage of idea engineering, this assumption will be validated.

OK, you are in your car, stuck in traffic, and thinking what to do about your unfulfilling job. This is a ripe time for inserting behavior change, because you are charged with negativity.

Lets stack another layer on top of this, namely the ability to make a phone call. For simplicity, lets say you are connected automatically to someone else, also in a car, and also looking for a job, and you can compare notes. And suppose the system does some matching. Note that we don't need to dive into the details here, since we are just exploring ideas. We might need to split this up into two or more layers itself. And there are definitely some technical considerations.

We just stacked three layers to create a unique idea. We will probably need more to make it all work.

The next layer could be to put the phone number on a billboard that is conveniently placed near a traffic hot spot.

We can experiment with other related ideas easily now. Car dating anyone? That just means swapping one of the layers.

Our ideas tend to flow more freely now. Suppose you are looking for a job, but you not in your car, but stuck doing something else mindless. Can you think of something? It is OK to swap out the layers to make the idea work. Often somethings are not compatible, but there is no harm in thinking of a new layer.

Using stacking, you can often generate a lot of ideas quickly. You still however need to evaluate the ideas individually.

I hope you have a great time coming with new ideas via stacking emotions and behaviors.

Good luck!