Then I thought about the similarities in the times I’ve said, “how did they think of that?!” And, I realized that I said it as much watching Mindy Kaling or the late-great Robin Williams as I did about cool new products or business models.
Think about when you laugh. For that brief moment, you aren’t thinking about anything else. Bickert described it as, “When you laugh, you’re more free, more open.” Valerio related it to what a comedian does too, adding, “A comedian doesn’t ask the audience what the next joke should be about….They have to be ahead of their audience, but not so far ahead that they baffle us …Similarly, the best market research is aimed at understanding how customers interact with a given product category, not asking them what should come next.