How do you come up with good ideas? That's a problem for just about every media business, and last night's Internet People event 'doonstairs' at classy Scottish theme pub Doon (see what they did there?) was a pretty lighthearted discussion about how to tease those conceptual gems out of the creative subconscious.
The first person to mention the creative subconscious was Alex Tew, mastermind of the evil genius that is the Million Dollar Homepage. If you've been living in a hole with no web access for the past few years, this is the guy that sat down with a notepad and the brief to make himself a million dollars. And then did, by setting up a website with a million pixels of advertising space and selling it for a dollar per pixel. I'm sure he won't mind me saying that the home page is just about the ugliest web page ever, but he is totally forgiven. He's also an extremely good beatboxer, but I digress...
"I'm Alex and I set up a crappy web page," he said. "But it's not so crappy in that it made me a million dollars."
Alex was delightfully anti-corporate and wary of "the province of professional idea generators", which jarred beautifully with the advertising types in the audience.
"I don't like the idea that there rules for coming up with ideas. The more I try and have creative ideas, the worse they become." He said the best way to come up with an idea is to think about solving a problem and just wait for answers.
"I'd call it creative unthinking - have a goal and let it fester. I believe in the power of the subconscious to work on things while you're asleep, and the idea generation that goes on without you knowing it."
In the context of Million Dollar Homepage, he said he started with the goal and the features he wanted and then worked backwards. The goal, obviously, was to be a millionaire.
"It had to cost nothing to set up, be something that would capture people's imagination, be quite bold and brazen and be all about money. It was a reverse brainstorm."
Creating a spark
Adam Gee, new media commissioner for factual at Channel 4, described four stages to the "idea generation process": identifying the opportunity or the problem; holding off the logical side of the brain while you generate ideas; a convergent stage where you make those ideas more solid; and subjecting those ideas to more logical analysis.
He referred to André Breton's 1924 surrealist manifesto and the metaphor of electricity.
"The strength of an image or an idea is largely dependent on the potential between two disparate things that you bring together. The further apart they are, if you can make that creative spark leap between them, the stronger the thing you come up with."
Paul Carr also made a great point in that there's a big difference between an idea and the execution of that idea.
"I'm not sure that MySpace was actually a brilliant idea. The idea was probably had three years ago by Six Degrees or Friendster or whoever, but what MySpace did was execute it well."
He said Six Degrees was a brilliant idea but it had no money and no value as a business. "MySpace took someone else's idea and built a business on it. Britain has the ideas but we don't have the infrastructure to support it and make it happen."
And again, where are all the UK start-ups?
Are we still having the "where are all the UK start-ups?" question? The consensus here was there there is no shortage of ideas in the UK creative industries, yet we haven't achieved success on the scale of MySpace, Google, Yahoo, etc etc, as we know.
Is the British temperament inherently resistant to change? Are we too slow to explore new ideas and challenges - or is that a human condition rather than a British one?
There were mutterings that Europe is still too divided to compete with the US, divided by language and history and, as put so delicately by Paul Carr: "Britain's attitude is not conducive to creative collaboration because we think we're better than everyone else".
Justin Champney, global head of brand innovation for McCann, disagreed.
"I see Europe as more pioneering, and the US as more regimented in its approach to innovation. From a designer's perspective, Europe has cultural differences that allow crossovers and the creation of new ideas. The US is not as culturally diverse and there aren't as many creative opportunities."
I suppose the latter statement depends on the extent you feel that funding creates, or at least helps support, a creative work environment. We hear intriguing rumours of Google's efforts to encourage creativity, like employees spending 20% of their time on new projects and ideas, and asking creatives to use the whole sleep/subconscious ideas thing. They can also bring dogs into work, which I'm all in favour of.
A constant state of flux
Robert Loch, our venerable host, said that Bebo took something like 15 days to develop initially, starting as a self-updating address book.
"They never really had an idea, they just threw something out there and developed it against the demand that came back."
That's a legitimate way of going about things in the new economy, said Adam Gee.
"You put out an initial conception and develop it in line with how people use it. Sometimes we don't know how to use it yet. It is a tried and tested method to put technology out there and see what people do with it."
Julia Shalet from WeeWorld (wee as in small) said much of their development is based around the ideas they get from users through their feedback forms.
"We have literally thrown away our plans for the future and planned what users have suggested," she said. "If you get a consensus of the same idea from lots of different users, that's where to focus your business."
More ideas for ideas
Various others suggestions included browsing Flickr, getting lost, leaving your comfort zone and erm, more scatological inspiration.
"For really great ideas you can't beat a good shit."
Charming.
