There was a simple, yet profound, article in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday related to the difficulty of truly innovating during new product development -- "A Recipe for Creating New Products: Take two completely separate categories; Combine" (27 October 2007) [PDF].
A couple of highlights:
To rejuvenate established product families, brand managers thus typically combine features of one product with those of others in the same family. This of a cellphone-cum-organizer-cum-computer-etc.
They overwhelm customers with additional features taken from related product lines. Since they believe that each additional feature represents a point of differentiation form the competition, managers find it hard to step off this never-ending treadmill. Paradoxically, in an attempt not to overextend the product line, managers overextend the product's features, leading to "feature glut" and reduced usability for consumers.
Instead of using features from many but similar product categories, cross-breeding uses only two dissimilar and even highly remote product categories to spark the conception of a truly new product.
It's amazing how difficult this simple concept seems to be. I have found myself trying to brainstorm truly remote product categories, and it's soo much harder than it seems on the surface. Free-association doesn't seem to work for me, because it tends to generate already associated items. And even when I think I've found two notions that are far enough apart, the potential applications seem so remote and ridiculous that I immediately want to dismiss the idea outright.
I guess this is the root of true creativity... forcing oneself to break out of common thought patterns and conceptual associations in order to find something "new." And the beauty (or curse) of product development is that even when you come up with something innovative, you then have to figure out how to make it somewhat recognizable and usable for people. After all, unlike pure design for the sake of design, a product must ultimately be useful, right?
Perhaps a combination of Ninjawords "random" word and Google's "I'm feeling lucky" might help me stumble upon something new.
So...
...might translate into something like a niche business selling lewd architectural accents? Hm... I wonder what that might look like....
