Realize That All Companies Need Great Ideas. All companies are dealing with challanges. Companies need to continually improve themselves to stay in business. And that's where you come in...
How to make money from this? First, decide in which areas you could contribute to any business. For example, if you're good at organizing your home, try to think of great that spesific businesses could implement those ideas in their workplace.
GENERAL IDEAS: You could provide ideas that could be useful in any company, for example an idea that would make employees more happy and more efficient. Any company with employees could have use for such information.
NICHE IDEAS: You could also find spesific ideas targeted toward spesific niches, for example how to simply extend the lifespan of glodfish while they're staying at the pet shop.
There's a great deal of money to be made simply by providing your ideas to companies. You don't need to be an expert, however, it would make it easier to sell your idea if you could prove that you really know what you're talking about.
As defined by Wikipedia, a patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to an inventor or his assignee for a fixed period of time in exchange for a disclosure of an invention.
If you have a great business idea, and if you think that your idea might be worth patenting, then you should first check if your idea really is unique and that there is no patent identical to your idea. A great way to search for patents is to use Google Patent Search at google.com/patents. Here you'll find more than 7 million patents.
The term "patent" originates from the Latin word patere which means "to lay open". Getting a patent will cost you some money, so you might consider selling the idea itself instead of recieving a patent. In some cases this would obviously be a mistake, in other cases this my be the easiest and fastes way to make some quick money. What you could do is "lay open" your idea with a trusted person or company in exchange for a reward. Naturally, make sure you don't spill the beans before you know for sure that you get your reward.