Creating Surprise is about coming up with a buncha new ideas to Pow! people, right?
Well, not always.
Sometimes your best ideas are the ones you scrapped and abandoned for dead long ago.
Ideas are a lot like wine, like art, like Microsoft operating systems (like me too, I would venture); sometimes, they need time to be fully developed, to reach their potential and to be properly appreciated. Forcing them into service "before their time," so to speak, is like taking a smart high school kid and making her the CEO of a multi-national (hey, on second thought...).
I've read a handful of articles in the past few weeks about Valley VCs combing through boxes of five-year-old business plans; searching a slush pile of rejects looking for "the next big thing." They're not desperate; in so many cases, it's not the idea itself that's bad, it's that the idea is bad for the time...or vice versa, I suppose.
Looking to Surprise? Then don't be afraid to scour your intellectual scrap heap.
Yesterday's pffffttt may be today's Pow!