What are the things to be considered in innovating a product?

 

What are the things to be considered in innovating a product?

Originally Answered: How do you do product innovation?

There are two fundamental modes:

1. Make a new thing that never existed before;
2. Improve on something.

Most people should focus on 2. Elon Musk improve on rockets and cars. Gates improve on computer. Jobs improve on phones.

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Innovation is disrupting the old. Not just minor improvement, but major improvement of something important for the target audience.

iPhone, improved over Motorola’s analog phones. It made a digital phone. It is a disruption.

Gates made a new operating system to micro computers.

Mark Andressen’s Netscape is a major improvement for FTP and other file transfer and email methods.

Why not “small improvement” you ask? there are two reasons:

1. Small improvement is hard in market place - you are too close to existing players
2. If you make something brand new, you need money to convince people to try it. It is very expensive and require a lot of investment. If you are not disrupting, no one will invest.