1. Always Ask and listen
   Successful entrepreneurs understand problems and aspirations of people better. By understanding a person’s needs, you will think of products & services designed to help others. Understanding comes with simply asking and listening to the people around you. The process of always ask and listen will generate business ideas, and evaluate market demand; rather than inventing sophisticated products or services that people don't need.
   
   When listening to others, be aware of unsaid hopes. Sometime people don't explicitly tell what they need or want simply because they never thought such products or services exist. Before budget flight become popular, people never said they want to fly overseas by paying only half of ticket price; they only said they wanted to travel overseas but not having enough money to do so. Smart entrepreneurs understand what people desire and provide solution for people to realize what they want in life.
   
   
2. Learn something new every day
   Ask and listen to other people are just two ways of learning something new for business idea generation. There are, however, many ways to learn new things to spot underlying opportunities. Browsing websites, reading newspaper, magazines and books will expand your knowledge and you will keep to current trends, problems faced in a society and where opportunities could arise. Even working for other people could be one way to spot on business opportunities in an industry which your company belong to.
   
   If your budget allow, you might want to go for short courses or classes to learn in-depth about certain industries in fastest way possible. Alternatively, you can have group discussion with people from different profession, educational and social background. The key is to commit to learn new thing everyday no matter how busy you are with current activities.
   
   
3. Synthesize ideas
   Synthesize ideas means putting two or more unrelated things together. I'm sure you have witnessed some of the biggest inventions when someone combine two or more things to come out with single solution. Combine camera and mobile phone, you get camera-phone. What other innovation based on synthesized ideas that you can think of?
   
   However it does not mean you can put two ideas together and succeed, but synthesize is still a popular process to generate ideas. The key thing is to run trial-and-error experiment; be willing to change your ideas from its original stand and collect as many input as you can to improve raw ideas into final product or services.
   

3 Ways to Generate New Business Ideas