For me, the main thing is to read a lot. I mean, just surfing HN and Reddit help a lot. But a lot of my "ideas" aren't necessarily "cut from whole cloth" so to speak, but they're more along the lines of "I could build a better version of X" or "Oh, hey, here's this new thing Z... what if I combined Z with Y, and added a sprinkle of Q"? Ya know, that sort of thing.<p>Another thing that helps is hanging out at the local hackerspace and just listening to other people talk about their projects, and batting ideas around with them.<p>I also make it a point to read a modest amount of non-techie stuff... I read books on history, physics, business strategy, marketing, economics, politics, etc., as well as plenty of fiction. For me, I think it's the synthesis of lots of disparate ideas, absorbed over a period of time, that fuels whatever creativity I have.<p>One last point... when you do have an idea, make sure to write it down, before you forget it. It may be that you have more good ideas than you realize, but just aren't capturing them. I've scribbled stuff down on a notepad before, and then gone back to it a year later and thought "shit, that's good stuff, and I had totally forgotten about it".