From Traditional to Online Methods for Generating Business Ideas

The traditional methods for generating venture ideas are in use for more than 70 years in the business, while the development of information and communication technologies (ICT) opened new opportunities for generating and harvesting business ideas, available to entrepreneurs of any kind. Our initial research discovered that there is a missing link in the academic literature between the traditional and the emerging online methods for generating business ideas and therefore, in this paper, we study the traditional and online sources and methods in parallel. The purpose of our study is to improve the venture idea creation process from an applicable perspective, and to add to the existing ideation literature by (1) identifying and classifying the sources of ideas to create the necessary link between the onsite and online access to idea sources; (2) explaining the traditional methods for generating business idea trough their dominant features in order to (3) further identify and elaborate the online sources and ideation methods trough these features and link them to the known traditional approaches. The sources, methods, and tools we examine and elaborate in this paper could be used for both, generating ideas for traditional and online business models. Hence, our findings have practical and applicable value for the first step in the entrepreneurial process. Additionally, our study could be used as a starting point for further research in the field of online ideation, a field that needs to be yet, more extensively, addressed by practitioners and research scholars.