In a world that celebrates hustle, our Entrepreneurship & Business Modelling class did the opposite, we slowed down. No laptops, no screens, just quiet minds and open notebooks. The result? A room buzzing with deeper thought and sharper ideas.
This week, our PGD students discovered that opportunity doesn’t strike like lightning. It grows in stillness, shaped by curiosity and structured thinking.
Read on to see how turning off the noise became our first lesson in turning ideas into innovation.
In this week’s Entrepreneurship & Business Modelling class, we did something unusual for today’s world: we closed our laptops. No screens, no slides, no chat windows. Just pens, paper, and quiet. You could feel the room change.
Making a space for quiet thought in this was a very intentional lesson on ideation for entrepreneurs. Most professionals assume opportunity recognition starts with a flash of genius, the fabled Eureka! moment that strikes at 3 a.m. In reality, the best ideas almost always emerge from slower, more deliberate work: curiosity given structure.
That’s what John Cleese explained in his now-famous 1991 talk on creativity. “Creativity,” he said, “is not a talent; it’s a way of operating.” His idea of the open mode—a mindset that allows play, patience, and pondering—contrasts sharply with the closed mode that dominates modern workplaces: busy, efficient, perpetually urgent.
In hospitality, that closed mode feels familiar. It’s the rhythm of check-ins, briefings and back-to-back service. Creativity, however, demands the opposite: time to notice what’s really happening.
So, we practised it. No phones, no notifications. Just observation. Because you can’t understand guest experience through data points alone. You have to watch the family struggling with luggage, hear the waiter improvising charm after a mistake, notice what people actually do.
Cleese calls it “pondering time.” We might call it professional patience. Either way, it’s where opportunity begins.
Giving Structure to the Imagination
Creativity needs structure as much as freedom. John Cleese’s point is simple: make the conditions right, and ideas appear.
We examined two tools: brainstorming and its quieter cousin, brainwriting.
Brainstorming most people know; it can work when ideas flow without judgment. It also tends to reward the loudest voices. Brainstorm favours extroverts and can lead to groupthink.
Brainwriting changes the setup. For our in-class experiment, our prompt was:
| How might we improve the hotel check-in experience for guests? |
Students worked in silence. Three minutes, three ideas, pass the page, build on the ideas you receive. Repeat. By the end, each sheet had gathered contributions from several people.
One student’s “late-night hotel food delivery” evolved through three rounds into a ghost-kitchen subscription model for extended-stay hotels.
The result: more ideas, more variety, clearer refinements, a record of everything generated. Brainwriting gave everyone a voice and gave each idea time to develop. It’s disciplined creativity, the right bridge into how we frame opportunities next.
Frames for Identifying Business Opportunities
Creativity gives you raw material. Framing turns it into insight.
In the PGD programme, we teach five practical “frames” that help students move from scattered ideas to focused opportunities. Each one trains a specific way of thinking.
1. Effectuation – Start with What You Have
Most people believe entrepreneurs begin with a perfect plan. In reality, they start with themselves:
Who am I? What do I know? Who do I know?
These questions form the basis of effectuation. Effectuation is an entrepreneurial frame pioneered by Saras Sarasvathy at the Darden School of Business. It’s a practical mindset: use what’s already within reach instead of waiting for ideal conditions.
As we explored this framework, one PGD student with years of restaurant and sommelier experience realised she didn’t need to open a new wine bar. She could pioneer a new business type making use of her resources to design corporate wine-tasting events using her existing network of chefs and suppliers.
2. Jobs-to-Be-Done – Find the Real Job
If each of the frames we looked at is a tool, then the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) frame is a power tool. JTBD is the brainchild of Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen.
Christensen explains: customers don’t buy products; they hire them to solve a problem.
A useful way to think about this framework is in the following format:
One student analysed the “job” of late-night staff meals. In addition to being hungry, workers are mentally tired after long shifts. The student framed it as follows:
"When I finish a 12-hour shift exhausted, I want food requiring zero decision-making, so I can eat without spending mental energy."
Her opportunity: A staff meal programme for hospitality workers with rotating menus that remove the burden of choosing.
When you identify the real job, you create solutions that people truly value. Many new ideas are innovative, but not all of them create real value. The JTBD frame keeps your eyes on innovations that will matter to people.
3. Research & Trends – Back Insight with Evidence
Creativity starts with curiosity and matures through data. Yes, research is still vital to entrepreneurs ideating new business opportunities. Tremendously so. In class, we zoomed in on three categories of trends to explore:
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Further Reading & Resources
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Next in the Series
Customer Discovery & Validation: Turning Insight into Evidence– a look at how great entrepreneurs test their ideas early, listen closely, and let real-world feedback guide what comes next.