What is a good strategy to help entrepreneurs come up with new products to create?

One of the primary ways entrepreneurs look for product inspiration is by examining the things that cause them pain on a regular basis. I don't mean "pain" in the physical sense, necessarily, but in the sense of something that is bothersome, like "paying parking tickets", or "finding a good meeting place for my group".

You can look at the things that cause you pain, or the things that cause other people pain, but it's always important to keep in mind that products need to solve a problem! If you're building something amazing, but that doesn't solve a problem for anyone, it's unlikely people will use it. Finding people who will use your product requires talking to people you don't know - "get out of the building!" is a common mantra for entrepreneurs looking to market test their product concepts. Most importantly, don't build anything until you've talked to people!

There are other cases, though, where there's no specific pain to address, but there is an opportunity for something new, like Facebook and Twitter stumbled upon when they were created. They may not have had a precise pain point in mind when they were thinking about their business, but they did find a market for it!

There have been very good philosophical answers regarding this. Essentially, inventors and entrepreneurs solve problems. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, there is never a shortage of problems to solve. What I'll add to this is a few methods that have proven to be very powerful in innovation. You might call them "tricks", but make no mistake -- they have been researched and used quite effectively. I'll mention two major approaches. One is called 'TRIZ', I invite you to look for material on the internet for this method, which stands for an acronym for a Russian system example, one attribute of a vehicle, like a car, could be "number of wheels". The value would usually be "four". All Attribute Listing does is place all these features in a list of what the user thinks are most significant. For example, the color of a car might be an attribute, but for most functional considerations, the color of a car is usually not important. Then all the user does is choose one or more of these attributes and their values and change those values. The number of wheels, for example, might be changed to three. Or five. The result is just a new version of the system. A three-wheeled car might be considered an interesting idea to evaluate. A five-wheeled car would likely be discarded as an idea. The point is that this system simply generates new ideas. Another method of generating ideas is called "SCAMPER". This is an acronym that is essentially a list of ways to modify an existing product or system. Information on SCAMPER is also easy to find on the internet. As an example, the first letter in "SCAMPER" is "S", and it stands for "Substitute". Again, this is presents an opportunity to find parts of the existing product to be substituted for something else. If we return to the example of a car, the part of the system to be substituted might be the engine. I substituting an existing gasoline engine for a diesel or an electric, this would result in a new product. So, given that you've decided on a particular problem to solve or a product to improve, these systems provide a simple, methodical way of creating new ideas. I've personally used these approaches throughout my career, and about half of my inventions that have resulted in new products or services were the outgrowth of these methods. They're straightforward, powerful, and fun to use.