A friend of mine swears by a strategy he calls "smashing ideas" to generate ideas for research: Take two fundamental ideas from the literature (the more fundamental the better) and try to smash them together into a new idea. Says a remarkable amount of research (and successful papers) can be viewed in this light. The strategy is obviously a great creative tool, generally. Though, for business I still reckon the best primary mindset to have is identifying real world problems and thinking of solutions to these problems (perhaps smashing comes in at this point). In research and art, creativity pays off more because real world benefit as voted by paying customers is not as important.