You only have $5 to invest. How to your turn that into real money?
This is the question Tina Sellig, Executive Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, asked her students.
“What would you do to earn money if all you had was five dollars and two hours?
Flickr photo by Conlawprof
Some of the ideas the students came up with were amazingly simple and highly profitable. What I found even more interesting was that by thinking through the problem, many learned how to look beyond their own self-perceived limitations.
I know I am often guilty of getting stuck on one train of thought which prevents me from seeing less obvious solutions. One way to avoid this is to develop a list of questions that you can refer to when you have trouble “thinking outside the box”.
In this story, the students who performed best were those that were able to step back and see solutions to problems they never even knew existed. Solving common problems has made many entrepreneurs over the years very rich. Henry Ford saw the need for the average person to have a vehicle, so he devised a way to build cars so that the masses could afford them (interchangeable parts and the assembly line).
Often, the hardest thing to do is get out of our own way.
What is one creative solution you found to a nagging problem?
