Thanks for sharing this. I read this around when it came out, but giving it a second read has helped clarify some of my thinking. Something I find helpful is t

Thanks for sharing this. I read this around when it came out, but giving it a second read has helped clarify some of my thinking. Something I find helpful is to have sessions where the goal is to come up with the worst idea you can about a specific topic or problem. This can be for both fun or profit. The key benefit of this is really opening up the field for a free and open discussuion. When a friend and I did this recently (for fun, not profit) and asked ourselves what is the worst "uber for x" we could imagine, we came up with Stork: an app that matches children as they are born with optimal parents, exchanging newly-born babies if the naive approach, having your own kid, would be bad match based on measurable variables. This is an awful, awful idea. But is it the seed of something interesting in adoption, babysitting, matching children to the right school, helping small children who have difficulty making friends find them? Maybe. I thing good ideas rarely become great ideas, whereas great ideas frequently have some seed of initially being horrible ideas contained within them, e.g. en app that lets you sleep in strangers' homes on air mattresses, sending dvds via usps in paper envelopes, etc. Something else I frequently do is preface a wild idea with "This is a horrible idea, but: " which I find helps lead to an open discussion, without people feeling challenged, or overly seriously approaching a conversation that is meant to be open. It can help signal that you want their thoughts and comments, and aren't explicitly issuing a challenge, trying to have a debate, or making a statement you already believe to be true and they might feel obliged to disprove.