From Idea To Empire: The Art Of IP Development

In the last post I emphasized the importance of identifying and mastering the basics of a craft or field of study. Near the end I introduced you to the five basic elements of Intellectual Property (IP) Development. In this post you will learn all about the first of these five elements: Conception: Generating Ideas.

Conception: Generating Ideas

“There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. ”
-Victor Hugo

To develop an idea, you obviously need an idea to work with. Of course there are countless ways to generate ideas (and we will explore many of them in this blog), but for now I’m going to generalize and give you a few of the most common methods here.

Inspirations and Epiphanies

Most all idea generation boils down to being inspired by something/someone or gaining a deep insight and understanding about something/someone that thereby inspires you to conceive an idea.

For instance, when I was 12, I was inspired to write game stories by a video game titled Final Fantasy VI. My characters for that game story were inspired by a myriad of other video game, comic, and cartoon characters that I was being exposed to at the time. The locations were inspired by even more games and movies. So on and so forth until I crudely wrote the story to completion.

Inspiration comes when it comes and while you can aid it, the most important thing is to be ready for it (you’ll learn how to be ready for inspiration in the next section—Gestation: Managing Ideas.)

One way to get inspired is to experience many different things in life. Expose yourself to lots of media, people, and places that have a good chance of inspiring you. I’m currently being inspired by Japanese TV Drama. If you’d have told me when I was younger that such a thing would inspire me, I would have probably looked at you strangely. Just goes to show that you never know what can do it for you until you’re exposed to it.

Instant Idea Systems

Ok, take a duck, a guitar, and a giant robot. Now make a hip-hop dance based off of these things. While nothing may come to mind immediately, these seemingly unrelated objects will get you thinking about all sorts of crazy stuff and who knows, maybe you’ll come up with some cool and unique moves.

This thought experiment exemplifies the essence of an instant idea system. Basically, you take random elements, mix them together and give yourself an objective. There are two theories as to why this method works so well.

The first is that creative constraint forces you to completely squeeze as much out of the few elements you have in order to utilize them to the greatest degree. Normally, when you are building a blue sky idea, you will quickly find yourself lost in the possibilities and rants are inevitable. With constraints comes focus. Focusing on a single element can lead to epiphanies, which leads to inspirations for ideas.

The second theory is based on the way your brain records and accesses memories. When you look at or think of a duck you have a certain network of neurons firing throughout your brain. Your concept of a duck may be linked to the park your grandmother used to take you to, which links you to memories of your grandmother and furthermore to that time you were at your grandmother’s house and stole money, which reminds you of a gangster film you saw and so on.

Each object has a completely different network of associations, emotions, and memories that comes bundled with it based off our personal experience. Hence why two people can see the same thing in very different ways; they both have their own, unique associations tied to it.

When it comes to generating ideas for something—say a baseball bat design—, we quickly resort to clichés and stereotypes related to that something—a spiked bat or a steel bat wrapped in some material (red tape for instance). Our brains are literally wired to do so. Therefore by introducing random elements into the idea generation process—a blender and jewelry—, it opens up the channels that your neural networks access and allows you to share resources between subjects you wouldn’t normally associate at all:

Blender Bat- A bat equipped with a blender in the middle that converts gems and precious metals into vibratory energy, which is released in a whirlwind that spins the powerful bat above the handle. The purer the gems and metals that are fed to the bat are, the greater the whirlwind force exerted by the bat will be.

Random Word Search

Another similar experiment is to take a dictionary and do random flips through it, stopping on a page and reading all the definitions on that page. This may take you across words, subjects, and concepts that you’ve never heard of before. Perhaps you can look into the ones that seem interesting. If you already know all the words, try using the instant idea mechanics from above with them.

Finally, how about using good ole’ Google to randomly search topics for you. You can be led down an interesting web of information this way. Next thing you know, you’ll be writing a story about string theory and sacred geometry!

Brainstorming

This is probably the method you have been taught through schooling. Brainstorming deals with taking a central subject of interest and just jotting down whatever comes to mind about it without any sort of discrimination or value attached to it. This tends to work best in group settings where each participant’s ideas can help stimulate the others and you can get many different ideas down quickly. Each idea, no matter what it is, has to be given equal weight and all judgment on them is postponed until a later time.

From there the objective is to review the ideas presented, discuss, categorize, mix and match, and see if there are any that work for your subject matter. I really won’t spend too much time here as there are loads of sites that cover brainstorming quite thoroughly. Here are a few for your reference:

http://www.brainstorming.co.uk/tutorials/tutorialcontents.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorming

Dreams

Perhaps one of the most intriguing ways of generating ideas is to look inside. This can come from your dreams for instance. Start keeping a pad and pen by your bed when you sleep and before you lie down to go to bed at night, tell yourself that you will remember your dream. This most often helps you to do so. When you have a vivid dream or see interesting things take place from the subconscious explosion of trippy imagery, make sure to write them down as soon as you wake up! Overtime, your dream log can bring you some pretty outstanding material. Here’s an example from one of the dreams I logged a while back:

"I was falling near death (death being a blue swirling pool emerging from the side of a sand dune), but I passed it and floated up and through the sky to another plane. There I ran atop translucent glass poles as thin as broom sticks. While running I dodged spiked pendulums and similar obstacles until I fell from the poles and landed in the sand before a great sword.

This sword was as tall as a sky scraper and shined like gold. It came alive and swiped at me, but I effortlessly blocked it with my forearm and assumed control of it. I was feeling good I think.

From there I ran forward and met an unknown 'thing', I don't know if it was God or what.

It flashed the entire spectrum of colors and assumed multiple 2D forms in 3D space. It looked like a tie-dye shirt with African masks or Easter Island statue faces moving across it, but it was blinking and moving like the aliens from the Atari video game Space Invaders.

I fell to the ground in a seizure. The sword was stuck in the ground in front of me and it had shrunken to the size of a normal sword. I thought I was dead at first, but I wasn’t, because a white man in a black suit, who said he was 'death', picked me up and laughed at me. He took me inside a white elevator with no front door that was sitting in the sand and up it went. He pushed me out as the elevator rose and wished me good luck.

When I came around to standing, I looked up and noticed that I was facing a beautiful woman, smiling eerily and staring at me, seemingly unable to blink. Without a word her head slightly lowered. I said 'Hi' and she made no motion at all. Thinking this was a test or something I began to walk pass her and she malformed into a demon snatching me back in a weird way with odd appendages that came from her body out of no where. Yet she returned beautiful and smiled and stared when I re-faced her.

I tried to please her by playing music. There was a keyboard in front of me now. As I started to play she beheaded me with a haberdasher like weapon and my head rolled. I thought this to be my end but then she beheaded herself and her head rolled in front of mine.

I tried to speak, but as I did, her face erupted a white milky substance that flew into my mouth as a continuous stream and this substance reattached my body to my head. I arose glowing all gold like. I had transformed into a super saiyajin or something. Then I woke up...”

Besides dreams, meditation can bring you profound insight and inspiration by flushing out your subconscious and giving you a clearer view of your life and all things in it. Heck, if you’re diligent enough you may even reach that rare and blissful ‘experience’ of oneness with being, nirvana, etc. Nothing’s gonna stop you from getting ideas after that.

Tasked Ideas

The final way to generate ideas that I’ll cover for now is to be given the idea to create or the problem to solve.

Let’s say you’re a composer/choreographer working for an orchestra and you’ve been tasked by the producer with making the orchestra physically move and play a human game of chess while they are performing. Each piece interacting has to be playing the main melody while the other instruments play softer, supportive sounds until it’s their turn to move or be taken.

You may not have come up with the idea, but now it’s yours to develop and this inevitably will lead to the need for more ideas about exactly how you are going to do it.

In the end, ideas act like goals that eventually lead you towards their actualization. Goal setting and establishing the vision is usually the first and most critical step in any creative or practical endeavor, which makes this element—Conception— your most basic tool for creating IP.

You will learn all about taking an idea forward from the core vision in Part 4 of the framework series. But we shouldn’t get too far ahead of ourselves just yet. We must first learn how to manage and organize all these ideas we plan to generate. The next post will show you just how to do that.

-Sage