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"This question originally appeared on Quora.\nHow did you get a million-dollar idea? What were you doing when you had the illumination? What did you do next?\nAnswer by Jeff Nelson, Internet entrepreneur, former Google employee.\nMy preferred terms for the process of ideation are synthesis and reduction.  \nDuring synthesis, a large number of ideas are created based on the problem at hand \u2014 without consideration for practicality, costs, risks, timeline and other factors. During reduction, some ideas are slowly and progressively eliminated; ideas that are impossible, impractical or undesirable are discarded first. The ideas worth pursuing are then prioritized and pursued. Next, those which aren't working are also discarded.  \nThrough this process of reduction, the ideas that are truly valuable eventually float to the top. Google Labs is a good example of this process. Of the thousands of ideas that are discussed, only a few hundred are pursued. Of those, maybe a few dozen are marketable, and only three or four find a profitable business model. However, if you had not discussed thousands of ideas in the first place, you could not have found the three or four that are truly valuable.\nGo meta.  Whenever you are working on a new idea, task or product, always be ready to generalize and look at the bigger picture. For example, if you are tweaking your shopping cart, briefly consider if customers would be better served by a total redesign of the shopping cart \u2014 or if you even need a shopping cart, e.g. Amazon One-Click.\nCombine two concepts. Most of the innovative projects I've worked on have involved simply combining two existing concepts in a new way.  For example, eBay's SEO project started because, as a 20+ year web developer, I (along with Sriram Samu, the other key person on the project) knew the value of SEO and knew eBay \u2014 despite being a multibillion dollar company \u2014 was terrible at it. By introducing some simple (non-blackhat) SEO fixes, eBay shot up in ranking. The Business Unit projected that project was worth tens of millions of dollars per month in new revenue, until the Google dance reduced eBay's rank significantly. \nBe hyper-sensitive to pain. Another technique for innovation is simply being hyper-sensitive to what's wrong around you. For example, one of the most valuable patents of all time is the paper milk container. Milk used to be carried in round glass jars, which were fragile, heavy and bulky. An inventor realized he could hold milk in containers made of heavy-duty, coated paper, which were [sturdy], light and could be tightly packed, resulting in one of the most valuable patents of all time.\nBring new tools to an existing problem. Much of the innovation in the Internet industry today is not coming from first movers with completely new ideas \u2014 it's coming from second or third movers [who are applying] new tools, such as machine learning/big data/data sciences, to existing problems.  For example, Palantir is trying to improve the ancient practice of law enforcement with data sciences.\nAdapt to changing conditions. For example, when I launched the original ChromeOS project in 2006, it was to address the speed and performance issues in Ubuntu and Windows by creating a faster OS. Only a few weeks into the project, it also became clear that ChromeOS could be built on top of webapps, resulting in a very lightweight, web-based operating system, now called a webtop.\nMore Q&amp;A on Quora:\u00A0\n\nHow do you win at office politics?\nWhy do tech startups still hire so many people?\nWhat is it like to be a strategy consultant?\n\nHave something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.\nMashable Job Board Listings\nThe Mashable Job Board connects job seekers across the U.S. with unique career opportunities in the digital space. While we publish a wide range of job listings, we have selected a few job opportunities from the past several weeks to help get you started. Happy hunting!\n\nVice President of Field Marketing at New Relic in San Francisco, California\nWordPress Web Developer at Emerald Expositions in New York\nCommunications Manager at The Lovie Awards in London\n\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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