Thinking of new products or new ways to solve problems should be a constant occupation.
General Motors encouraged engineers to always be thinking of new ideas. They would even give you a bonus if the idea was not a direct part of your job. Silicon Valley startups are based entirely on team members coming up with a continual stream of new ideas.
As a consulting firm we would frequently get non-technical people calling up with what they would say was a "million-dollar idea." Some times they did not even want to share the great idea, since hey were sure we would steal it. Their mentality was that since they had this great idea, we should be willing to do all the work in design, test development and even marketing, and they might share, oh, 20% of the proceeds.
I took to calling these folks "idea men". When I explained we could not afford to take the risk of developing idea, we were available for around 100 dollars an hour to do the design and testing. The callers were shocked engineering costs so much. That was another sign that the caller had no idea of the expense,
risk, and difficulty of doing product design. Indeed, we have come up with our share if ideas, and like those callers, the difficulty is not the idea, but the execution of the idea.
