In good times and bad, what keeps a business going is the ability to think outside the box and not be tied down by convention. Coming up with small innovations such as low budget marketing tactic or innovative pricing strategy isn't just for entrepreneurs with high creativity. The seeds of creativity and innovation exist in all of us. Robert Epstein, author of The Big Book of Creativity Games, recently discussed in Scientific American Mind the four skills of creativity. You need to build these skills to master innovation and creativity in your business:

• Capturing: Good ideas can strike at anytime and be quickly forgotten. Have a simple system such as a note pad to capture your brainstorms.
• Surrounding: Epstein says to surround yourself with interesting social and physical environments to foster new ideas.
• Challenging: Having tough problems to solve provides you with the interconnections for new ideas.
• Broadening: Learning new things and broadening your knowledge can have an impact on your creativity.

Imagine a world where you could only name your baby with a name never used before. Everybody would be more unique. But pity the parents who had to come up with a name after all the popular ones like Lucy and Jack were gone. Being born later in the world would result in names such as Xxxoomph72. School attendance would take much longer.

The online world and .com domain naming is much like the above scenario. There were more than 162 million domain name registrations across all of the Top Level Domain Names (TLDs) at the end of the first quarter of 2008 and domain name registrations grew 26 percent year over year, according to VeriSign's Domain Name Industry Brief. The challenge is to register a simple domain name for your business or spend big dollars to secure a name from cyber squatters.

A recent scan of Time Magazine's 50 Best Websites for 2008 reveals a multitude of newly formed words to counter the simple domain name shortage. Name concoctions for the coolest sites include: ffffound.com, someecards, and imeem.com. Not exactly easy to remember but the simple phrases are gone. Finding the right domain name is a process not to take lightly. With the continued rise of .com domain registrations, the future only holds more Xxxomph72's than Buy.com's.