Why the Best Business Ideas Come From Outside Your Industry

The concept for the modern Starbucks coffeehouse did not come from a coffee industry conference.

It came from a trip to Italy.

Howard Schultz walked into an espresso bar in Milan in 1983 and saw something that did not exist back home. He brought it back anyway.

Hero Cosmetics was born the same way. Co-founder Ju Rhyu was living in Seoul as an expat when she discovered acne patches, which were standard in Korea but completely absent in the U.S. She saw the gap and filled it.

Neither of these ideas came from studying their own industry harder.

They came from looking sideways.

This is something I think about a lot as an operator. Some of the best process improvements I've brought to product businesses came from completely unrelated fields.

Logistics thinking borrowed from restaurant kitchens. Customer retention frameworks adapted from subscription software. Demand planning principles pulled from supply chain research that had nothing to do with e-commerce.

If you only read inside your field, you will likely only find ideas and solutions your field already knows about.

There is a simple challenge I borrowed from Frans Johansson's book The Click Moment:

Pick up five magazines or follow five accounts that have absolutely nothing to do with your business. Then ask yourself: what would this mean for the problem I am trying to solve right now?

The wider you look, the more original your thinking becomes.

What is the most unexpected place you have ever found a business idea or solution?