100 Crazy Ideas

By Costa Michailidis

1. Self-cleaning Cloths.
2. Haircuts that have utility.
3. A dog training service that trains your dog to do useful things, perhaps even income generating things.
4. Garbage cans that recycle trash.
5. Crowdsourced education.
6. Using devices (smartphones, laptops, etc) as wireless routers. Imagine every device boosted the wifi signal.
7. Shoes that clean the ground.
8. Grounds that clean your shoes.
9. Toys that build character.
10. An alarm clock that simulates the sunrise and sounds of nature to wake you up.
11. A smart phone that brews your coffee just before your alarm goes off.
12. An app for phones to control your TV remotely.
13. A “home” app that connects all of your house’s appliances to the cloud.
14. A bedtime stories database sortable by what type of difficulties your child is having.
15. An app that scans text from paper onto a screen.
16. Retractable packaging - a serivce that sends packaging back to the seller for reuse.
17. Lightning-powered pants.
18. Lightning-powered power plants.
19. Pants that heat up or cool down depending on the weather.
20. Clothing that heats up as you move.
21. Paint that changes hue when hit by sound waves.
22. GPS for pets. No-more missing cat flyers.
23. Laws that prevent the above technology from being used on people.
24. Sailing on top of the atmosphere the way ships sail on top of the sea.
25. Using one of those atmosphere sailboats to attach the elevator to space.
26. Attaching an expiration date to money.
27. Having a presidential debate with instant audience approval ratings.
28. A series of tech educational videos for old folks.
29. Social skills curriculm at schools.
30. Teaching creativity at school.
31. Toys that teach creativity at home.
32. Video games that teach social skills.
33. Remote controlled snorkeling robots.
34. Underwater Greenhousing for Coral Reefs.
35. Underwater farming.
36. Indoor farming.
37. Dolls of role model women: Rosa Parks, Hillary Clinton, Melinda Gates, Gaby Douglas.
38. A counter for how many times Google searching has settled an argument.
39. Sorting your email by who sent it to you instead of by date.
40. Voice command emailing.
41. A sink that doubles as a dish washer.
42. Have the stearing wheel vibrate when you’re too close to the car behind you, instead of that annoying beeping sound.
43. Hats with solar panels. No more dead cell phones.
44. Refabricate pay phones as public outlets. No more dead cell phones.
45. A totally customizable all-in-one healthy habits points system that’s enforceable.
46. GPS tracker for expensive jewelery, so that when it gets stollen you can tell the cops where to look for it.
47. A school that farmed some of it’s own food locally so that students could learn about farming, and systems in general in a hands-on way, maybe it could sell some of that food during harvest season as well.
48. Word-of-the-day unlock screens for smartphones.
49. To-do list on the unlock screen for smartphones.
50. Starbucks set up at busy intersections right up along the street like a drive-through.
51. Flash Mobs that do something useful.
52. Cable car systems for traffic-dense cities.
53. A mobile dating app with augmented reality personal ads/profiles.
54. Planes that are remotely piloted from the ground so they can’t be hijacked.
55. TED Talks from historical figures (such as: Abraham Lincoln, Aristotle, Cleopatra) written by historians and delivered by actors.
56. A bracelet that measures your vitals and stores them in your own personal health database.
57. An app that calculates the nutritional value of your food when you take a picture of it.
58. Using trees to boost WiFi signals.
59. Using cars to boost WiFi signals.
60. Offer drivers in big cities a tax deduction for mounting a WiFi device onto their cars. The device is powered by the car, and the more cars adopt a device the better the city’s WiFi.
61. An app that told you if someone near you went to your high school or college, or had something else in common with you.
62. An app that gave live stats on parties.
63. Massive Multiplayer Online Games that have a productive output or side effect.
64. A spoof of drug commercials to educate kids on the dangers of drug abuse.
65. Pockets that clean your smartphone screen.
66. Smart outlets, that know how much voltage and amperge is optimal for the device that’s plugged in.
67. Cars with multiple energy systems. Solar Panels, Batteries, a combustion engine, breaks that absorb energy.
68. Cars that pull electricity from the road.
69. GPS on public transporation so that we have live updates on when trains and buses will arrive.
70. Packaging that decomposes into fertalizer.
71. Self-sorting Trash.
72. A dating site for old folks.
73. A vacation website where you can search by feeling. For example: relaxation, excitement, laughter, peace.
74. Do-it-yourself cell phone repair kit.
75. The personification of smartphones. Name your device, let it decide things like which restaurant to go to, have it friend other smartphones on Facebook, dress it up for Halloween.
76. Replace text emails with video messages.
77. Napster for university lectures.
78. Contests where the prize is a job at Google or IBM.
79. Cell phone screens that double as solar panels.
80. Order business cards directly from Linkedin.
81. A web app that let’s you watch TV shows or movies with friends while you’re not in-person.
82. Cup holder that keeps your coffee hot.
83. Building material that sweats to cool the building down.
84. A bar that only people going out alone are allowed into.
85. A website where movie fans can request sequels and contribute ideas for the screenplay.
86. A video game that helps you succeed in your career.
87. A career exchange program. You mentor someone who’s looking to get into your field, and someone from the field you want to get into mentors you.
88. A browser plugin that puts old bookmarks along side search results, so that you can be reminded of the things you bookmarked when you search with similar keywords.
89. Touch screens for laptops.
90. A marketplace that connects bazzars in developing countries with buyers in developed countries.
91. An online platform that helps people crowdsource the completion of small tasks rather than donations.
92. Doubling your headphones as earmuffs in the winter.
93. Combining geothermal energy principles with the heat differential required to run a sterling engine. This could generate electricity in the winter, especially when it snows.
94. A feature that allows you to follow, friend, and share contact info with someone by bumping phones.
95. Computer Viruses that attack other computer viruses.
96. A waterpark built at the beach.
97. A remote controlled droid for safari adventures. Look out for that Lion! (You break it, you buy it)
98. Flip-chart-sized paper airplanes.
99. Bacteria-resistant money.
100. A Doomsday Kit that held the information needed to restart civilization if we had a near extinction event.

Insights in Idea Generation

Most often when we start to come up with ideas to solve a problem, whether we’re alone or collaborating with a group, we evaluate the ideas as they come up. Consequently we stop at the first good idea. A better way is to defer evaluation, and just list out ideas, hundreds of ideas! Amongst many ideas there will be some real gems. Also, what’s typical during idea generation is for people to think of the typical ideas first and for novelty to emerge later in the process. Next time you’re faced with a challenge that requires some imagination to solve, try generating a hundred ideas for how to solve it.

Lastly, some of the crazy ideas above are real in some form or another, can you guess which ones?

An itty bitty BIG Problem

By Costa Michailidis

While creative ability in the US declines, the challenges that require creativity are increasing in size, complexity, and quantity. In the past, even a mere half-century ago, problems that we faced on a daily basis had fairly predictable solutions. Most manufacturing jobs could be summed up as the routine execution of a handful of tasks. Today, the challenges we face have far less predictable answers. Software engineers are constantly inventing new solutions to programming challenges. Health care professionals are taking more challenges diseases and an aging population. Teachers are faced with the obstacle of educating their students for jobs that don’t exist yet. These challenges, and most others today require Creativity to solve. Bad news: there is less and less creativity going around.

What is Creativity?

We often think of creativity as an intangible, sometimes even magical, property. You either have it, or you don’t. It can’t be quantified, broken down, measured or improved. Some ancient civilizations even believed creativity (or genius) was a spirit that possessed you and helped you to produce creative work. Perhaps we won’t ever fully comprehend creativity, but over the last half century, psychologists and other researchers have uncovered incredible insights that reveal a little bit about how that magical property works. Aspects of creativity have been identified, measured, even improved. One of the earlier researchers in the field of Creative Studies, Ellis Paul Torrance, created an assessment that measures Divergent Thinking, a critical skill needed to think creatively.

“The Creativity Crisis”

In 1958, the first Torrence Tests for Creative Thinking (TTCT) were conducted with Minnesota elementary school students. Since then researchers have followed up with longitudinal studies. The verdict: In the US, creativity peaked in 1990. A Newsweek article, titled The Creativity Crisis, explains the details.

Science isn’t alone in concluding that creativity is declining. The most watched TED Talk in the last two years is titled Schools Kill Creativity.

Creativity may be in decline, but what does it matter?

Faster World, Tougher Challenges

The world is changing at an accelerating pace, and as things change we must adapt to survive. Adaptation, in essence, is the ability to solve new problems, and the class of problems that we’re beginning to face puts 20th century challenges to shame. The Climate Crisis, Peak Oil, and a Global Water Shortage, are some chief challenges highlighted by the Arlington Institute. For a deep dive into the top ten challenges facing humanity, check out a TED Talk by Stephen Petranek titled 10 Ways The World Could End.

Creativity is declining, and our challenges are getting bigger and more complicated. It’s like we’ve leaped off a cliff and the ground is rising up to meet us.

What to Do?

The pace of change is so fast that we can’t foresee the problems we’ll need to solve tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean we won’t need to solve them. What we need to do is get better at problem solving, and creativity is key!

What do you mean “think outside the box?”

By Costa Michailidis