The New Product Race
We all want our products to be at the cutting edge of innovation, to be new, to prove we are the brightest and smartest. If this comes form a deep competitive spirit is not our concern. We must satisfy this need.
First, you should know that statistics are not in your favour and most certainly you will not produce a completely original idea. Still, remeber that great painters started their career copying other famous artists. This is of course a learning exercise and should not be understood as a copyright infringement encouragement.
If you want a uniqe product you should first take a thorough look at the market and ask yourself:
What do I know about the existing products? Is there anything that can be improved?
Although it may come as a dissapointment even some of the craziest ideas that come to our mind might have already crossed some other people's minds. Geniality is not overrated, creatig new products takes more than a morning epithany.
There is this advice that comes poping again and again: "when creating a new app think of your daily problems and needs". Now, the problem with this is that your app must perform on rather large numbers of clients and if your needs have not been by now satisfied, at least partialy, they are most certanly way too specific. Specificity of a small niche does wonders in art market but I'm not so sure about that in a mass market.
After your critical look and teting session of all the existing products you found plenty of faults and a reasonable number of features that you consider necessary. This process ought be a permanent one because otherwise your competition will get ahead by providing features that now lack from your application. Without new features an application will sooner or later loose market share, clinents needs continue to change, that kind of evolution should be met by your new features.You must anticipate that users get easily bored and new functionality must come before they start searching for alternatives.
If you found missing features at other products take good care to have a complete product, one that doesn't leave spaces to be filled by other products. Listen to what your customers say about your (and competition's) application and correct or porvide what they want. Social Media can be a mess when your product is lousy, user will not miss a second to "advertise" the bad in your product, however this is a great opportunity to impress. Answer publicly to their insatisfaction and provide immediate improvements.
The Price
Think about some of the most eluding engeneering problems that have had through the history only partialy satisfactory solutions. Baterries for instance, even though the concept is not new we can find every other week some pice of news about better batteries and still the small energy containers are far from what we want. Automotive, computer and telecom are just some of the industries complaining that batteries techologie is a major problem. Every new improvement comes as a result of larger and larger research budgets. The bottom line is that completely new products are harder and harder to get and one should be careful not to bind oneself into such chymeras when attempting to design a new product. New at all costs might not be the best strategy .
Some of the world’s most famous inventors spent their life and family resources to pursue their goals and many of them ended in poverty and anonymity. Even once you have your product on the market you will definitely have a hard time protecting it or to market it.
And if nothing can deter you from inventing remember:
1. Keep yourself versatile, technology has fewer and fewer fixed lines.
2. Start by reinventing yourself.
3. Routine is toxic.
4. Do not be afraid of ridiculous, today’s ridiculous is tomorrow’s normal.
5. You shall fail. This will not stop you.