Hunch: How To Turn Everyday Insights Into New Business Ideas

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Need help to brainstorm the next big idea for your business? Harness the power of hunches.

Thanks to the book Hunch: Turn Your Everyday Insights Into The Next Big Thing by Bernadette Jiwa, we now have a simple way to generate powerful business ideas.

Short, succinct and highly readable, Hunch provides a few simple exercises and frameworks that you can use to generate (possibly) your next entrepreneurial business idea.

While the techniques used are fairly simple to execute, they do require you to have your eyes, ears, and other senses open.

Before we dive into these ideas, let us first take a look at some of the myths and truths about winning business ideas.

How Great Business Ideas Really Happen

What does it really take to come up with winning business idea?

Well, the answer lies in getting the right insights—an ability that only comes from asking the right questions.

We need to be able to listen to our emotions, respond to our intuition and use our imagination.

Contrary to popular belief, these insights do not come from sudden epiphanies (ie Eureka moments), a desire to be a unicorn (“The Grab of ______”), or pure genius. Rather, they are often stumbled upon by individuals who noticed what happens in their everyday lives—at work, at play, in the community, or at home.

The 6-Steps of Valuable Ideation

A good idea comes about from the following steps:

Focus: Prioritise undistracted thinking time (yes, no scrolling of TikTok!)
Notice: Start to pay attention to people’s behaviours, patterns and anomalies around you
Question: Get into the positive habit of asking questions, and finding answers
Discern: Distill the right ideas to pursue further
Predict: Turn your insight into foresight (with a Minimum Viable Product)
Try and Test: Get feedback on your idea by testing

What is a Hunch?

Predicated on the right creative process, a successful hunch occurs when the right…

Ideas = Solutions in search of problems meets
Opportunities = Problems begging for a solution

Coming up with the right hunch involves listening to your intuition, having emotional intelligence, and sense-making—a process that could take years and years of practice.

There are two main ingredients in a hunch. The first is insight: this is predicated on your ability to recognise patterns through lots of practice. The second is foresight: your ability to see the potential and predictions of how a business idea could take shape.

In short:

Insight + Foresight = Hunch

The 3 Ingredients in a Hunch

According to Jiwa, a good hunch is formed at the intersection of the following:

Curiosity (Interest + Attention)—Your ability to see problems and discern which ones are worth solving
Empathy (Worldview + Understanding)—Truly understanding how the person with the problem feels and thinks
Imagination (Context + Experience)—Build on what’s already understood to connect ideas and describe future possibilities

These three dimensions can be represented by the graphic below:

To tap onto your hunches (be it in curiosity, empathy or imagination), Jiwa proposes that a 3-part practice be adopted for each of the areas:

Prompt: Immerse yourself in an environment where the potential problem could arise. This is the context where your customer could be in.
Action: Write down what actions could be taken to address the issues, as well as problems that have cropped up from there.
Insight: Reflect upon what you’ve observed and jot down potential applications.

Let us look at each of them in detail now.

#1 Cultivate Curiosity

Curiosity comes from the Latin word cura, which means to care, to be careful and diligent.

It inspires us to solve problems and think creatively, and is the feeling we experience when we don’t know something that inspires us to set us out on the path to discovery.

Ways to Tap on Curiosity

Here are some ways to cultivate your curiosity and use them to develop insights:

Observation: Spend time where people are queuing or waiting, notice what they do, and jot down insights
Notice Frustrations: Note down what people are struggling with (eg carrying shopping bags up a bus), and suggest how they can be fixed
What’s Wrong and How It Could Be Fixed: Examine a wider societal, national or international issue (eg plastic bags in ocean), zoom in on the problem, and suggest how it can be fixed
What If: Come up with various options to a common problem, eg making something bigger, smaller, faster, slower, removing it, etc.
Take It Apart: Consider how an experience can be taken apart to its various steps, and what should be changed to improve things.
Why Is It This Way: Deconstruct a successful user experience of a business, examine why it worked, and recommend how it can be applied to your business.
Why Did It Fly: Look at successful businesses (or potential successful business), look at reviews or articles, and ask yourself probing questions on why it succeeded, and how you can apply those lessons.

#2 Embrace Empathy

“Empathy is about standing in someone else’s shoes, feeling with his or her heart, seeing with his or her eyes. Not only is empathy hard to outsource and automate, but it makes the world a better place.” — Daniel Pink

Empathy means feeling with someone—it is distinct from feeling for someone. It is a powerful ability, as our ability to empathize with others makes us better at coming up with business ideas that resonate.

A great example of empathy comes from Sara Blakely’s multi-billion dollar company Spanx.

The idea came when she was getting ready for a party and tried on a beautiful pair of cream trousers. However, she couldn’t wear them! This was because normal women’s underwear left an unflattering panty line, while traditional shaping underwear was too thin and tight, resulting in bulges around her waistline and thighs.

To overcome this, she cut off the feet of tights that she wore, tried them on under her trousers, and voila! Spanx was born.

Ways to Tap on Empathy

Here are some ways to exercise your empathy muscles:

What Do They Carry: Check out what your customers carry in their bags, or what do they have in their kitchen. They reveal a lot about the person’s life, personality and values. (See also ethnographic research.)
What Do They Value: Have a look at the clues in your customer’s environments, the apps on their phone, and the stuff that they collect. This shows you what’s important to them.
What They Want To Do (But Can’t): Lookout for people attempting to do something yet failing—use a parking meter, pay using an e-payment app, or use a device perhaps?
What Do They Say: Listen to what people are talking about—yes eavesdrop on them and gauge what they’re concerned about. This could be a rich harvest of insights.
Ask For Their Backstory: Another possible source of useful information, allowing you to learn how they tick.
Who Do People Do That? Consider their habits and behaviours, especially quirky ones!
Storyboard Their Customer Journeys: Map out their journeys and sketch them out. Are there any critical stages or gaps? (See also this article.)
Notice Their Life Hacks: See if you can find any makeshift “life hacks” that people use to solve a problem. Are there any insights for future products there?

#3 Ignite Imagination

Last, but certainly not least, insight often comes from employing one’s imagination.

Imagination is the ability to make unexpected connections between problems and solutions. It is the breakthroughs that we make when we stop to look at problems from a different angle.

Ways to tap on Imagination

So how do we dream up unconventional solutions?

Challenge Existing Assumptions: Yes, think about everyday objects that work pretty well, and consider how they can be revolutionised. For example, can apparel be made fully customised for each individual body using 3D printing technologies?
Why Is It Like This? Ask if something frustrates you why the designer has made it that way. What is the original logic?
Why Not Do It This Way? Is there something that you are itching to change? Make a list of the reasons what’s frustrating about it currently, and come up with ways to overcome it.
Imagine Opposites: Think of something that is an opposite to current norms. Can you flip it on its head? Who would this new product or service be for?
Embrace Constraints: Necessity is the mother of invention. Think about an existing constraint and how it can be simplified or removed altogether.
Get Bored! Yes, sometimes the most creative insights come when we do a mundane everyday task.
Transfer Inspiration: Consider if the ideas from one domain (eg nature) can be transferred to another domain (eg clothing).
Reinvent The Future: Is there a problem that can possibly affect billions? How could you solve a “moonshot factory” type of problem, and what steps do we need to take to reach that goal?

Creating Your Hunch Log: The 4Is

Towards the end of the book, Jiwa suggests that you can create a hunch log (download yours here.)

This allows you to document your idea-discovery process from insight to opportunity, and serve as a record of your ideas. This is divided into four sections:

Inspiration: The Spark — Eg. Consumers find it tedious to fill up multiple forms asking for the same information from the government
Insight: The Revelation — Eg. On the Internet, a single sign-in allows you to access multiple resources (eg Google Tools)
Idea: The Solution — Eg. To implement a single sign-on process for citizens, using Singpass
Implementation: The Execution — Eg. Develop prototype software. Roll out MVP. Iron out bugs. Roll out to mass.

Conclusion

As you’d imagine, hunches are hardly foolproof ways to pioneer the next universe changing invention.

On the flip side, there are many business ideas that have failed to see the light of day, even if they started from the right premises (eg curiosity, empathy, and imagination).

However, such tools tapping on our intuition are still worth pursuing. If done repeatedly, and diligently, you may just be able to roll out a market building innovation.

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