Entrepreneurs: How do you come up with Ideas? How did they do it?

[Apollenaire]

How did they do it? Steve Jobs had already created Apple when he came up with Ipods, it was just an extension of what he was already doing and seemed (to him) a logical next step. He had an uncanny sense of what people would use and that is what made his business so successful. Facebook wasn't the first social network but had characteristics and timing in the presentation of those characteristics that made it successful, HD-TVs was a case of the technological advancements coming together. Playboys was just an idea Hugh Hefner had for a magazine he wanted to publish and it coincided with what the public (or enough of the public) was ready for and wanted. Harry Potter author JK Rowlings was working for Amnesty International and conceived Harry Potter when a train she was taking was delayed. She married, had a kid and divorced and then finished the series. Like Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg) or Playboy, Rowlings did not start off thinking that her enterprise would make them world famous and ridiculously rich, the simply were passionate about something they felt could be out there and possibly pay for itself and if they could live off it fantastic (but I think only Hefner thought it could make a living, Zuckerberg just saw a need and Rowlings just wanted to write). Jobs took existing technology and applied it to a problem (accessing music).
Specifically looking at what consumers/people demand in a particular time period requires research (which anybody with the funds can do) so it requires a little luck. Now even if a group of companies do the research they are not equally placed to act on it. If they already have a reputation or can get into production quicker or can adapt it to a changing marketplace will determine if they are a trivia question or a large multinational in five or ten years. For the most part, if you have a group who is interested in social media, very interested and follow all that goes on in social media and think they have a way to improve on social media or some aspect of social media as it exists today then you have a workable idea. Or if you can come up with technology or use existing technology that replaces social media as it exists today or improves (facilitates) social media you have a workable idea.

A new service means just that a service that didn't exist before you implemented it. There were magazines with pictures of nude women before Playboy. What Hefner did was say I want more than just pictures of nude women, I want penetrating interviews, I want relevant articles, I want tastefully photographed models, I want famous models and he got Marilyn Monroe for his first issue which gave him a ton of publicity and sold a boatload of magazines which got him the advertising dollars to continue. So he didn't create something new, he enhanced it. Henry Ford didn't create the car, he created a method for mass producing the car. Teflon wan't invented to coat frying pans, it was invented by NASA to protect space ships re-entering the atmosphere, later it occurred to someone it could have commercial applications.