Tuning questions for “boring” ideas

Many ideas are already there, but are gathering dust in the back of our drawers. Why? They simply did not ignite, were too “normal” at the time of their creation and now seem “old” to us. Yet there is undiscovered potential in them.

We at the Verrocchio Institute have been looking at such “normal” or “old” ideas again and again for a long time and have tried to find out what these ideas actually lacked to become really exciting.

In the process we came across many different aspects. We collected these and translated them into a uniform format and tool. The results are our “Tuning questions for ideas”. These questions will help you to tune and enrich your ideas or business models and make them simply better and more successful.

The tuning questions:

  1. How can you make your idea flexibly scalable?
  2. What do you have to change so that your idea automatically earns money?
  3. What do you have to add to generate bill of exchange expenses for your customers?
  4. How could fun come into your idea?
  5. How does your idea become a big secret?
  6. What can you do to protect your idea from competitors?
  7. How can you bring eroticism into play?
  8. How could you get your idea off the ground?
  9. What would a child do with your idea?
  10. Which detail of your idea is the most fun for the customers?
  11. How could you package your idea differently?
  12. How can you bring a repeating pattern into your idea?
  13. What is really new about your idea?
  14. What changes when you remove important parts of your idea?
  15. What happens if you turn your idea upside down?
  16. How do you turn the disadvantages into advantages?
  17. What changes if money is not an issue?
  18. How could you turn your idea into an adventure?
  19. What would your idea say if it could speak?
  20. What would a hero do to help you?
  21. What changes your idea with the customer?
  22. How can you earn more money while giving away your idea?
  23. What can you leave out without destroying your idea?
  24. Where else can you find ideas to enrich your idea?
  25. How does the advertising for your idea look like, if you hide the most important things?
  26. What happens if you double the price of your idea?
  27. Which ideas from the past could you activate to enrich your idea?
  28. What would change if you had a serious mistake free?
  29. How can you integrate social media into your idea?
  30. What can you do to turn your customers into fans of your idea?
  31. What would change if you had one wish free?
  32. What would be different in the year 2050?
  33. Which old paths of thought and trampling could you leave behind?
  34. How can others do the work?
  35. What would you have to do to make your idea do exactly the opposite of what it should?
  36. What would be different if the digital world did not exist?
  37. What do your customers do just before or after they have used your idea?
  38. What happens within a radius of 10 meters around your idea? 

To use the tuning questions optimally and efficiently, different options are available:

1. complete list
The most efficient method with the highest probability that an idea will really improve or change into a better idea is to apply the complete question list to an idea.

You should spend at least a few minutes on each question and think it through. This is the most challenging way to work with the list.

Important: Write down all the answers to the questions – this will make the idea generation process even more effective.

2. spontaneously appropriate questions
The second option is to read through the list of questions and write down the numbers of the questions that feel exciting in relation to the ideas. These questions will then take longer to answer. It is also possible to hold a whole idea-finding workshop for individual questions.

3. question lottery with the team
Variant three is called the question lottery, it is more aimed at a team that wants to tune a certain idea. For this purpose, all questions on our list are written on e.g. moderation cards or printed out. The participants of the team form teams of 2 and each team draws a question card blindly.

Afterwards, each team of 2 carries out a creative work to answer the drawn question as creatively as possible. After 30 minutes all teams present their answers. Afterwards, new pairs are formed, each of which draws a new question card.

Have fun using the tuning questions.

With inspiring greetings,
Benno van Aerssen