My best ideas come to me when I'm not focusing on work, but either walking, swimming, biking, or doing something else. Sometimes I will be working on something and get stuck, and I can go to sleep and go back to it later and fix it. Other times, it might take me a week of being away from it to just think outside the box and come up with another way to make it happen. Another thing I like to do is just to scroll through Y Cominbinator's Hacker News and read articles or see what other people are doing. I also tend to take a look at major social media networks and look at the "smaller features" that no one really knows about or that they didn't put a whole lot of time or focus on, and I re-create those and make them better.
For example, I wanted a place that I could post anything on the Internet (plain or HTML) without much trouble.. I didn't want to sign up for an account, I didn't want to put in my email in order to gain access, or connect one of my social media accounts to it, I just wanted to remain anonymous and write something or create a web page and share it with my friends or others on the Internet, simple and straightforward. In my research to see if it existed, I had only found one called pen.io and while I loved it, I saw the value of it, it was still restrictive of my needs. I wanted to use HTML and CSS and even JavaScript if I desired, so I created it. https://mypost.io/
Our best ideas, I think, actually come to us when we're not so tuned in, but rather, tuned out. Programmers should definitely take up a hobby of doing something other than focusing on their work. Start a blog, start a website, read articles, share thoughts and ideas with like-minded people... your money making ideas are there, you just haven't figured out how to fully understand them yet. Having a hobby allows for our brain to think another way, and sometimes, we do have to apply that logic to our programming. Even at work, as a web developer, I can only sit and stare at the computer screen for so long, before I just need to walk around the building 2 or 3 times to feel refreshed again.