Ways to think of ideas for a start-up: From Wesley Tansey’s blog post

  • Repurpose Take a service or approach applied to one market, and apply it to another.
  • Digitize Take content or functionality that exists only in a legacy form and put it online or in an app.
  • Automate Take a task that seems tedious and currently requires humans and automate it away.
  • Unify Create a common platform that ties together proprietary solutions or providers.
  • Componentize Take a piece of functionality that people currently implement themselves and make it a reusable component.
  • Connect Transform a situation where people are isolated or lonely by connecting them in a novel way.
  • Catalyze Encourage people in a community to generate data that would otherwise be less structured or available.

Probably this is also the way towards creativity.