Predicting which new ideas will succeed and which will fail is virtually impossible. At best, you’ll only learn what was true last week. The truth is, creativity isn’t about wild talent. It’s also about productivity. To find a few ideas that work, you need to try a lot that don’t. Your instincts are your best guide. Take chances. Be a visionary. And remember research and statistics haven’t kept all those big companies from going into Chapter 11. Now hold on a minute. We’re not saying that research isn’t important. What we’re stating is it’s not the ultimate panacea. Use it as a good unproved theory to work from. Think of research as living archeology – digging deep into the psyche of your customer, not for answers but for information. Demographics and psychographics provide the mix with interesting ingredients. But they’re steps in the process, not the process itself. Here’s where the muse comes in, and where instinct and experience enter the picture. This is the great unknown, where the alchemy happens.