How to Build Great Ideas On Key Facts

How to Build Great Ideas On Key Facts

By Shlomo   Maital

 How do you develop great ideas for startups (whether social or business-oriented), that truly meet unsatisfied wants and change the world?

   I got an idea about ideas, from the current issue of TIME Magazine, of all places (Sept. 8 and 15 double issue).    This issue has an incredible number of interesting facts, presented creatively, visually. 

   You get great ideas from one key fact.  That fact at one fell swoop demonstrates vividly the need, and sets the stage for thinking big,  for tackling huge problems with huge impact, if successful.

    Examples?

•    At present,  2.4 billion people are connected to the Internet; 44.8 percent of them are in Asia.  That means that 4.6 billion people have NO Internet connection.  How can this pressing need best be met?   Challenge:  Find a way to bring the Internet to 4.5 billion people who currently lack it. 
•    At present, 2.8 billion people in the world cook over open fires; 4.3 million people die each year due to indoor air pollution, caused by open fires used for cooking. Most of the deaths are women and children. Challenge?  Find a way to save millions of lives, lost through inhalation of smoke from indoor cooking fires; 
• Half the world’s children go to schools without electricity. Challenge: Find a way to bring electricity to the 1.3 billion people in the world who have no access to it.
• Between 1998 and 2010,    463 children have died of overheating or hyperthermia in cars in the United States, the majority of whom were accidently left behind by caregivers.   Challenge: Find a simple way to prevent this.
•    60 million plastic water bottles are used annually in the United States alone. Challenge:  Find a biodegradable plastic, that degrades in 90 days, and that also fertilizes plants.  (One of my students in Shantou Univ. China, is close to a solution).

*  Apple has $158.8 billion in unspent cash reserves.  Huge cash reserves are held (abroad) by Microsoft, Cisco, Google, Pfizer, and other U.S. companies.  Challenge: Feasible legislation to get them to bring the money home and invest it in America.

   And, one example of how this could work.

• Why don’t we get heart cancer???   Because tumors grow when cells divide and multiply uncontrolled – but heart cells never split and multiply, beginning shortly after birth, unlike other cells.  

 

•    Idea: Technion Prof. Yoram Palti thought that if you put an electro-magnetic field around, say, the brain, when brain tumor cells tried to divide, creating a narrow cell wall, you could explode them with the magnetic field. This could treat ‘untreatable’ tumors and stop them in their tracks. Basis: Cell division is largely by sick ‘cancer’ cells.   Palti, who is over 70, and his startup now have a proven device that stops brain tumors in their tracks, as well as lung cancer (very hard to treat).  Check out “Novocure”. Thanks, Prof. Palti!