3. Start a dream journal. Set book by your nightstand for next 30 days and write down your dreams. You can write whole dream or journal what stands out for you. You can even write down just symbols, say it was rain, clouds, flying, or school.

Copyright Doreene Clement All Rights Reserved

Doreene Clement, a cancer victor and author of The 5 Year Journal, is currently writing a new book, Blessed, about her life and her cancer experience. For more information www.the5yearjournal.com 480.423.8095 Copyright 2005 OMDC, LLC All Rights Reserved

In process of innovation, you need to be careful not to stifle creativity. This means allowing ideas to come without judging them at first. It also means using techniques only as tools, not as a rules. If your mind goes off on a creative tangent - let it.

Randomly combining things is a great mental exercise when you're driving or daydreaming. A boat and a bicycle becomes a waterski-bike that glides across lake using pedal-power. Combining stock-trading and McDonalds has you imagining selling of stocks and bonds at drive through windows.

For more specific problems, you just look for things to combine with what you already have. If your taxi business is struggling, combining "taxi" and "pets" might lead to a successful arrangement with a kennel, to pick up and deliver their client's cats and dogs. "Famous people," might give you idea to run some sort of tour of town, like they do in Hollywood.

For maximum creativity in your innovation, look far and wide for concepts to combine. "Meditation" and "amusement parks" seem too unrelated to yield interesting combinations, but I'll bet people at a carnival would pay to be put into a meditative trance using latest brainwave entrainment technologies.