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| Invention
Invention Posted by John, 12th August 2003 I was thinking about some new ideas I had for products the other day when I stumbled across this interesting little quote: "Everything that can be invented has been invented" The statement was made by Charles H Duell, the Commissioner at the US Office of Patents. Wow - if someone in such a senior position said such a thing, could it actually be true? Well, in this case, Mr Duell was a little bit off the mark. He actually made the statement way back in 1899, so you'd have to conclude he turned out to be spectacularly incorrect - especially when you look back through over one hundred years of incredible inventions! So people must be inventing stuff all the time. How come we get stuck when trying to think up new ideas then? I think breakthroughs and true innovations only come around rarely. Then everyone jumps on the bandwagon, clones the technology and incrementally improves upon it. So how do you go about dreaming up a new idea for a product? This is not a very easy thing to do. As a minimum, I think you need two things: - Whatever market you're in, you need to have a really good awareness of the products and features available out there. - You should also be a user of those products. How else are you going to know what works and what doesn't? Product ideas rarely seem to spring up overnight, although 'Eureka!' moments do sometimes happen. Without doubt, most of my strongest ideas have formed slowly over long periods, with just little nudges of inspiration from time to time. For instance, Mercury started off life years ago as a basic button creation utility. I used to find it frustrating to have to use paint programs to draw two images for each web button, one normal, and one for a mouse highlight effect. I got so frustrated I eventually wrote a little utility program that loaded up 2 basic button images, allowed you to enter the text for as many buttons as you required, and then automatically generated all the buttons with the text on them as JPG files. This was only a simple little utility, but I figured if I was having these problems drawing buttons for web pages, other people must be too. I kept refining the idea over the next few months, but saw there were already some fine products available doing pretty much the same thing. I lost heart in the idea but for some reason filed it away. A few years later when I first started writing Java applets, I realised my old button maker idea may have some mileage as a button graphics engine embedded in an applet. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. With just a few parameters, the applet could generate a huge range of buttons, and you wouldn't need to ship any graphics files at all with the pages. This little story just demonstrates that you don't need a staggering, completely new idea - you can simply base your product on something else, or combine ideas to come up with something new. It's important that you figure out how to improve upon the basic concepts to make your product stand out from the competition. Personally, that's the bit I enjoy most - implementing a useful feature or idea that no-one else has got around to yet. |
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