5 Reasons to Buy this Book:
- Learn how to capture, organize, and grow ideas into tangible output
- Provides help thinking through your Big Gig in life—the “steering wheel of your interest and curiosity”
- Learn how to create a personal platform of observation for finding high-value ideas
- Receive a self-diagnostic tool for evaluating your progress as an Idea Hunter
- Get a guide to creating your Idea Portfolio
1 Reason Not to Buy this Book:
- No specific suggestions for which technologies or tools you can use to capture, organize, or store ideas in
Background
…the word “idea,” in fact, is culled from the Greek idein, “to see.” ~ The Idea Hunter
My last book review explained how to ‘Steal Like An Artist’ to generate business ideas. While that book is excellent for understanding the true nature of creativity, this book is excellent for systematically hunting for entrepreneurial ideas. The three co-authors of this book are: Andy Boynton, the dean of Boston College’s Carroll School of Management; Bill Fischer, a professor at IMD; and, William Bole, a journalist at Boston College. All three have been hunting ideas for quite some time now, in multiple places. This book is based upon their research into how experts from many domains work with ideas to achieve success, and the book is based upon the authors’ own personal experiences.
What You’ll Gain As An Entrepreneur
There are many great things that this book provides you with to transform you into an Idea Professional.
The comforting lesson from this book is that in order to capture good ideas, brilliance is optional. However, being idea-active is required. It’s not the genius who creates or discovers entrepreneurial ideas, but rather, those who have developed a habit of searching for ideas every minute, everywhere. Breakaway ideas come to those who develop this habit. You’ll come to realize that valuable ideas exist everywhere, you simply need to spot these and modify the best of these to create the next innovation.
The book starts out with the above lesson and quickly gets you thinking about your Big Gig in life. Your Big Gig is the “steering wheel of your interest and curiosity” in life around which you focus your hunt for ideas. Your Big Gig drives your hunt. This makes the hunt personal and fulfilling.
Soon enough, the authors dive into the meat of the book—showing you how to hunt for ideas. The four tactics of your life-long hunt should include:
- I – Be interested. This is a discussion about how curiosity can make up for brilliance.
- D – Diversify the hunt. Key tips on how and why to travel down a variety of paths to find exceptional ideas.
- E – Exercise the habits of the Hunt regularly. This section expands upon the following:
- Know what you’re looking for
- Train yourself to observe things
- Record your ideas
- Create a rough expression of your idea—a prototype, to set an idea in motion to create some tangibility that others can picture and provide feedback on
- Manage and monitor your past ideas to let them collide with other ideas, stretch out, ripen, and grow into something tangible
- A – Become agile with your idea flow. Here you’ll get suggestions for paring down ideas, making the best ones visible, and starting to make decisions about them. You must eventually launch your ideas.
The last big takeaway from this book is the advice on how to create an Idea Portfolio. This is all about tracking your sources of high-value ideas and knowing how to store these. This is an incredible section of the book that helps you think about the effectiveness of your idea sources and how to save time by focusing on the best of these sources. Lastly, the authors give you a great intro into setting up your idea storage bin. Unfortunately, the authors leave it up to you to find the actual virtual or physical bins you’ll use. They completely leave out any specific suggestions. Personally, I recommend using Evernote because it is powerful and free.
Evaluation
According to the front cover, the author’s goal in writing this book was to show you “how to find the best ideas and make them happen”. My opinion is that the authors primarily help you find entrepreneurial ideas and only give you an introduction into making them happen. However, this is fine by me because there are plenty of books on executing ideas but few on how to generate good ones.
I read this book in early 2012 and continue to benefit from it. Thinking first about my Big Gig in life was important for helping me focus my idea hunting. This book led me to developing the idea for this book review site. Others have created websites similar to mine, but I’ve looked over those sites, swiped some of their ideas, then made my site’s format different from theirs and in-line with my interests. I have been on a constant hunt for ideas since reading this book in 2012 and I routinely record my ideas in Evernote.
Final Comments
This book has to be one of the top five books I read last year. All entrepreneurs should spend some time focusing on how they can become an Idea Professional. Heck, everybody ought to do this. Whether you want to come up with the best business ideas to earn a profit or simply create new ideas for your personal life, this book will help you get it done.
Remember, idea creation is easier than you think. You don’t need to be brilliant or create an idea that is completely original. You simply need to hunt for and spot ideas and morph them into something new. That is how you can make innovation happen. This book will get you set up for your life-long Hunt.
Click here to check out The Idea Hunter on Amazon.com
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