Why Not?
How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to
Solve Problems Big and SmallBarry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres
(Harvard Business School Press, 2003)


This isn’t the first brainstorming guidebook for businesspeople, but it’s surely one of the most appealing. In chatty, yet smart prose, the authors, one a business professor and the other a law professor, offer tools for discovering profitable ideas. One notion is to start with an existing consumer problem, think about how wealthy people solve it, and identify a low-cost equivalent. Another approach suggests that we start with solutions to one problem and see whether they can be applied to other problems, perhaps by rearranging the elements of the solution. None of these tools is new, and brainstorming is an inherently difficult process even with good tools, but together they provide a practical way to kick start thinking. To keep the process grounded, the authors cite an entrepreneurial venture of their own (Honest Tea) and offer sensible advice for implementing ideas in a competitive marketplace.