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Product Innovation - How To Have Ideas
by Kanaga Siva
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The easiest route to creative product innovation is to start with something we
already have and ask some simple questions about it to suggest new ideas. For
the sake of demonstrating how this can be done, we'll suppose that we want to
design a new kind of bicycle.
We start by asking a lot of questions about
the existing product. Along with each of these questions, we ask "What new ideas
or possibilities does this suggest?" The following are some of the questions you
might start with.
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What complaints do people have about this product?
Complaints or
"problems" are a great place to start looking for innovation opportunities. In
the case of a bicycle, people might complain about the uncomfortable seats, for
example, which leads to all sorts of ideas about how to make them better. Maybe
buyers could sit on a substance that takes an impression of their bottom, in
order to build seats to fit the individual.
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What else could be added to this?
What possibilities does this suggest? A
"pet carrier" in front of the handle bars comes to mind, with a strap to hold in
your cat or small dog. A GPS unit for bicycles is another possibility. A "roof"
to keep the rain off of you might work.
Why do people buy
this?
Product innovation often comes from asking why people use an
existing product, and considering different and possibly better ways to meet
that same need or desire. In this case we can guess that people buy bicycles for
transportation, to get exercise and, in the case of mountain bikes, for
adventure. We can consider each of these motivations in looking for new ideas.
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"Transportation" make me think about other forms, like trains, and this
immediately brings to mind the idea of a bicycle of sorts that travels on rails
very fast from city to city by pedal power alone. ""Exercise" suggests looking
beyond stationary bikes and regular bicycling that is limited by season. How
about an indoor track that has turns and hills and is designed to make winter
biking possible and interesting? Adventure biking suggests speed to me (among
other things), and makes me wonder if a spring system, wound by the riders
pedaling, could be used for a sudden burst of speed.
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What are the various limits involved, and how can they be changed?
A
bicycle typically is limited to one or sometimes two people, but what if it
could hold twenty? This question suggests a pedal-powered bus that a group of
people could travel in. Price is another limit if you want to sell bicycles.
Weight is other limiting factor. There is definitely a market fore lightweight
bicycles. At the moment light materials are the usual solution, but what about
making everything smaller? This also makes the bike easier to
store.
There are other questions you can ask to suggest new ideas. "How
can I make this cheaper?" for example, is a question that could help almost any
new product design be more marketable. "What else do buyers of this item want?"
is another good one. And by the way, whether they are good or not, all the ideas
above came to me from the questions asked and during the twenty minutes it took
to write this. Generating ideas for product innovation is relatively easy once
you practice with a few good techniques, like the questioning method outlined
here.
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About the author:
Copyright Steve Gillman. For inventions,
new product ideas, business ideas, story ideas, political and economic theories,
deep thoughts, and a free course on How To Have New Ideas, visit : http://www.999ideas.com
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