To grow our businesses we probably don’t need more money, but what we do need are better ideas. Stop worrying about new investors and lengthy business plans, and focus your attention on what really matters. If you want your business to thrive, you not only need better ideas for now, but for the road ahead, as well. This fact shouldn’t strike you with fear, but instead, it should make you realize how important the idea process is, and it should also excite you for what the future holds.
So, here are the five most important steps to create better business ideas:

1. To have better business ideas, you must begin with research.
José Scheuer, a lecturer in business and marketing at the London School of Business and Finance, says that market research is necessary because competition is tougher than ever. In a recent interview, José explained that small businesses compete in a much larger field than ever before, much due to the growth of e-commerce. And with the growth of e-commerce, other small businesses, and large businesses, it is often found that competitors have greater negotiating power to source products and sell them at cheaper prices. This is why you must not miss the competitor advantage that research gives you.
Research is what will separate you from everyone else and will only make you better. What are other people in your business space already doing? Steer clear from those ideas, and find your own niche. Research will tell you where you need to be now and in the future, as well.
Who can you reach out to that will make you and your business better? Research those in your field who are doing things right, and learn from them. How do they work, what positives can you take away from their work, and how can you make your business better than theirs?
Whichever area you need help with in your business, researching businesses who do things well and not so well will help you become better. You can always learn from the triumphs and mistakes of other businesses. It amazes me how easy of a concept this is, and yet people miss out on it time and time again. These are the same businesses asking themselves, “Why are we not effective?”, when there are tons of resources available to help them become better. You need research to become better, so you can impact more people.
2. To have better business ideas, you must build on your previous ideas.
Joel Gascoigne, the founder of Buffer, built his company on the ideas of other scheduling Twitter clients and apps that didn’t perform well. He extracted the good ideas from those apps, threw away the bad ones, and then made his own tweet scheduler to fit his own needs and the needs of many others.
If you aren’t familiar with Buffer, the main difference that sets it apart from other tweet schedulers is that it has created a way to queue up tweets based on the time of day where the most people can be reached, instead of scheduling each tweet individually, without knowing if your audience is even online to read your content. Joel’s idea with Buffer shows that rarely is one idea sufficient on its own, because ideas are meant to be built upon. If an idea comes to you, make sure to capture it, but never consider it your final idea. This is where the ideation process is given life.
My own practice is to grab two ideas that have one similarity or more, to see how they relate and to see how they’re different. Once I have an idea of how they fit together, I take two brand new ideas that are completely different from the first batch, and then find something similar between those two ideas.