Something I've had parked at the back of my mind for years is understanding how exactly founders are able to come up with startup ideas. There are some amazing resources online that touch on this, such as Paul Graham's How to Get Startup Ideas, that elaborate on how coming up with ideas largely revolves around noticing gaps that exist at the frontier of knowledge / what is possible.

And I agree. It really should be that simple.

However, while it's simple to come up with an idea, it isn't so simple to go about figuring out how it can be turned into a business. There's no shortage of "$100M Startup Ideas" floating on the internet, most of which are tarpits with a critical flaw that stops them from being solved.

That being said, more and more startups are cropping up every year that expand the realm of possibilities for both businesses and consumers, so there are clearly more business opportunities out there waiting to be found. Given all of this, I have just one question:

Why are they so hard to find?

In the past I've looked at developing solutions for video editing and warehousing (and learned that product validation/marketing is the hardest part of launching a product, not the product development itself), but these solutions pale in comparison to the ideas unicorns explore in pursuit of solving major systemic problems.

Obviously the world of unicorns is on the extreme end of what is possible, but I suspect that the line of thinking to come up with these ideas is largely the same regardless of business size. I'm of the belief that everyone is capable of seeing high-value business opportunities, and that they are abundant even in the most mundane of activities. Since the notion of the "serial entrepreneur" exists, and that successful startup founders will often go on to (attempt to) launch multiple other startups, I have a hypothesis:

Business innovation is a skill that can be learned

So how exactly do I intend to test this hypothesis? By creating an index of successful startup businesses that explores their underlying problem, and views them through the lens of The Innovation Equation:

New Solution = Old Solution + Innovation + Differentiation

To briefly explain why the equation is structured the way it is:

• Old Solution: There used to be an approach for solving a given problem before a startup started addressing the problem differently (this approach may literally have be not solving the problem)
• Innovation: The core feature of a solution from which users derive benefits (i.e. excluding all the bells and whistles)
• Differentiation: The ancillary features that may differentiate a solution from its competitors that implement the same innovation
• New Solution: The preferred approach to solving a problem which was developed and validated (not always in this order) by a startup

I'll be focusing primarily on startups in Australia as while I do agree that a lot of great ideas come out of Silicon Valley, it isn't a prerequisite, and there's more to gain by looking at what's around - the barriers to research and insights should be as low as possible. As I progress, I expect that some themes may emerge and I'll be sure to create a dedicated space on this site to share those insights.

Here's to learning about all things Business Innovation!!