Most people look for similar properties to combine for strength but what about taking totally opposing forces to take on the laws of physics! If you have a fast car and you combine its best properties with that of another faster car do you get the fastest car? Not necessarily. Why not take the fast car and combine it with the best properties of a bicycle to produce a lightweight vehicle capable of maneuvering easily through traffic? Innovative ideas are not the outgrowth of an existing idea but a convolution of different ideas to come up with a unique new product.

This principle can be applied in many ways and in many different aspects of life. You have a book and you have a computer. Totally disparate objects but now we have tablet computers, some dedicated to reading text (ergo books) as a life changing invention for many today. The latest talk is that the tablet computer will replace conventional personal computers due to their personal form factor and portability.

Extending a successful product in interesting ways can take a spent market and breathe new life into it. For example, power supplies are probably one of the best understood technologies but then along comes laptops which afford a new need for smaller, more efficient power sources which has given rise to many new advances like the fuel cell which may not be in a laptop but is being considered for future products. A refillable power source definitely extends the concept of the power supply by combining stored energy with replaceable propellant to provide a more environmentally friendly alternative to disposable batteries.

One approach is to find a problem that needs to be solved and try to find a combination of ideas that with a little work can provide a satisfactory solution. Think about the problem of converting ocean water to drinkable water. When I lived on the Gulf Coast back in the 1980's there was a real boon in self desalination (process to remove salt from ocean water) systems to cut down on utility bills. I had an uncle who was very good at coming up with these ideas and implementing them (he had one of the first hovercrafts I had ever seen) and had developed an idea for desalination of ocean water. Problems in implementation (mainly the pesky local EPA standards) may not have resulted in safe drinking water but he was able to use the resulting water to water his grass, plants, garden, etc. You may not totally solve the problem you set out to solve but you can probably adapt your solution to solve a related problem or unrelated one.

So, when looking for a new idea to pursue consider working through what are common ideas and combine them with a not so common one to produce something unique and wholly useful. Combining the process of using solar energy and optics could yield a power multiplier to allow you to capture more energy from the Sun than is initially provided. User your imagination and see if you can come up with a marketable idea by clever combination of existing ideas.