The Road to Entrepreneurship...

Wouldn’t It Be Nice If…(WIBNI) is one the many ideation techniques that I learned about during last summer’s course in business creativity. It is by far one of the easiest techniques to implement and it is quite surprisingly very effective. WIBNI is a technique that can be used to brainstorm for all sorts of ideas and it is not just limited to new business ideation. For example - It can be used to think of new ways to improve operational processes on a production line. The prerequisite here (and this goes for all other ideation techniques that I will discuss) is that we keep a watchful eye for problems that affect us in our environment. Remember my earlier post on listening?

The WIBNI process in itself is pretty simple: just ask yourself the question - Wouldn’t It Be Nice If…? Do this over and over again, each time writing down the questions that you asked. Once you have gone through this exercise a couple of times, review and rank the questions that you came up with in order of most intriguing - to you. Do not worry about the feasibility of answering or solving the questions just yet. The goal here is just to get your mind going. Think of this technique sort of like a dreamers wish list - you are an entrepreneur after all!

To give you an example, I hate going to the neighborhood Jiffy Lube (or Midas…) to get my oil changed every couple of months. It is a hassle that I just do not enjoy. So I could use WIBNI to figure out ways to fix this problem - Wouldn’t It Be Nice If…

• …The car oil change guys came to me instead?
• …I did not have to chain my oil as often?
• …I could be engaged while waiting to get my oil change done?

Those are just quick questions that came to mind while writing this blog post so you can see how easy this is. I bet you can come up with similar questions about this problem by yourself. However, based on those questions alone, maybe one of you already has an idea on how to change or improve the oil change business.

The point is, stepping back and asking the question: Wouldn’t It Be Nice If… can help you think of solutions to problems in a different way, and that is more than half the battle to getting a good business idea.