This has probably been my most natural, and most productive, strategy: Notice irritation. Irritation says, This shouldn't be, and can the first step to figuring out what should be. It's probably why I've produced so many tweak-ideas here, modifying to things that already exist. Which is cool, but also somewhat limited. So I want to know--and so does everybody else--what's the new-idea analog? What kind of mental experience contributes to having ideas that are less tweaky, more new?
Here the experimental literature is not at all helpful. There's a fair amount of work on group and individual brainstorming, but since that's all in response to a clear task, it's not a very good analog for the actual in-the-wild having of creative ideas that aren't modifications of existing things, or at least are largely different from similar existing things.
The non-experimental literature is, as usual, full of advice. "How to be original" is probably second only to "how to be happy" in the allegedly nonfiction genre I hesitate to call self-help; some of it's good, most of it isn't. There are strategies for creativity, but most of it is about how to modify existing ideas to make them more interesting--putting things in a new context, changing perspective, etc.
What about ideas that are only minimally modifications of pre-existing things? Twitter's the best recent example: it's called microblogging by some, but it's more a whole new thing.
Conclusion: I need a better sample space of really original ideas. Suggestions welcome, but I think this is going to take some research.
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