h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The four 'tools' outlines in the Lateral Thinking entry are fantastic aids to generating ideas. There are more. Another way is to scale-up or scale-down a problem. For example – which restaurant to eat in tonight. Scale-up – which part of town, which town, which country, which continent; scale-down – what tpye of restaurant, what dish, what ingredient (if noodles what type of noodles, what shape).

Does anyone no of any more idea generating tools?

Unless you are a monk with years of experience in meditation, it's practically impossible for your mind to be empty. So just keep pushing bad ideas out of your mind, and like air rushing in to fill a vacuum, more ideas will come. Keep filtering out the bad ones and eventually a good one is bound to come along.

Agreed that it takes a lot of training (dare I say mind control) to meditate, but I disagree that meditation is only when you clear your mind of all thoughts. One is also meditating when one is parallel-processing as many streams of conscious thought as one can. Lateral thinking is simply connecting divergent streams of thought, which of course becomes easier when there are several streams to connect.