How to Find ‘Every Day Problems’ That You Can Fix With Your Ingenuity

 

The best inventions are undoubtedly the ones that address an everyday problem that everyone experiences. Of course the printing press, the refrigerator and penicillin are pretty impressive creations by all accounts; but when you ignore the major players it’s really the things like Velcro and post-it notes that affect the way we live. These are the little solutions to universal problems that just make life that much easier, and in almost every case they make their creators very, very rich.

So if you’re looking for a new idea for a product, then that’s the kind of thing you should be looking at. Stop thinking about how you can provide the world with free energy for a moment and instead think of something you can realistically fix with a cheap and elegant solution. If you’re stuck for ideas, then read on for some tips on how to have these ideas…

Keep a Diary

Every day we encounter plenty of annoying frustrations that we barely notice because we have just accepted them. Right now my shoes are wet from walking in the rain, and earlier I struggled to get comfortable on the sofa with my laptop. There are probably plenty of solutions to both these problems that lots of people would benefit from, but the challenge lies in noticing the issues to begin with. By keeping a diary of your daily life you can find issues that you face on a daily basis and then go about trying to solve them.

Combine Things

The easiest way to come up with a new invention is to combine two existing products. Look around you and think about the ways you could combine things in your field of vision. Right now I see a mouse and mousepad, hmmm, maybe there is something there?!  By combining multiple items you can make them smaller and more portable and thus more useful for a lot of people.

Make Work Faster

One of the best ways you can come up with a new creation is to think of a way you can do your current job more quickly and efficiently. While this isn’t something everyone will benefit from, it will benefit everyone in your industry and you’ll have a built in market for it when you release it. Designing in a field you know well is always good advice because you’ll know precisely what is needed.

The Step Back Technique

The step back technique is a method you can use to come up with a new idea that will help make a simple every-day task easier, or even to invent something more grandiose.

Here what you are going to think about a problem that people currently want solved and that big companies are currently struggling to deal with, and then ask yourself what the next best thing is. In other words then you might note how popular the idea of flexible displays are currently and look at some of Samsung’s prototypes for inspirations and then ask if you can’t approximate the same results with some kind of projector. You might not be able to compete with the big businesses, but if you can create a ‘temporary fix’ then you can sell a lot in the interim and pave the way for future developments.