4 Tips for Coming Up With New Product and Service Ideas

4 Tips for Coming Up With New Product and Service Ideas

Innovation is what keeps our businesses refreshing and growing.  By thinking up new products and/or services to offer, we can:

  • Stay in step with evolving market demands and trends
  • Keep pace with or get ahead of the competition
  • Acquire new customers
  • Sell more to existing customers by offering them new products they may need

Business ideas don’t necessarily just come to you like magic.  However, there are things you can do to make the process more focused and deliberate.

On the other hand, if you are too rigid or too structured when it comes to developing new products, it may suppress your creative juices.

Instead, think of the process as “harnessing” your creativity.

Here are four tips for how to harness your creativity to come up with new products and services:

Apply The 15% Rule To An Old Idea.  Some entrepreneurs feel that innovation means they must almost literally reinvent the wheel.

You don’t really need a completely new idea, though.

Instead, pick an existing idea and apply the 15% rule to it. The 15% rule simply means to set out to improve on something by 15%.  Make an existing technology 15% smarter.  Make your service 15% more customer friendly.  Make a product 15% more efficient, or 15% less expensive with 15% more value.  You get the idea.

And you don’t necessarily need to make it a thousand times better right out of the gate.  Just strive to improve a modest amount on an existing idea, and then you can build on it over time.  It just has to be different enough to seem like an improvement to buyers.

Amazon.com, for example, isn’t a grand idea; it’s an ecommerce store. However, the speed and efficiency with which it operates makes it a top retail outlet in the world.  The breadth of selection and the intelligence that its technology brings to offering product selections are impressive.  Amazon improved upon the retail model.  It didn’t offer all of innovation in the beginning that it offers today — it started out modestly.  But it continued to improve over the course of years.  Can you do the same?

Travel to Gain Ideas.  Travel is one of the biggest self-teaching endeavors you can ever take.  Leaving places you know well for completely different ones opens up your senses.  It gets you paying attention to things around you.  It makes you be more mindful because you are seeing, smelling, and hearing new things.

By experiencing new things and new places, you may come up with ideas you wouldn’t have thought of.

Now take those ideas and build on them.  If you experience new foods and new tastes, does it give you ideas for new offerings in your restaurant or food business?  If you see buildings of different styles or colors, could it trigger ideas for new clothing styles in your fashion or interior design business?

Whether you are a once-a-year tourist or a veteran traveler, chances are you’ll come back home with your head brimming with ideas.

Solve Your Own Needs.  I can’t tell you how many entrepreneurs I’ve interviewed who said that they came up with the idea for their business because “we solved a need we had in our own business (or in my own life).”

As you go about your day, think about how to solve a nagging problem in your life or business.  Then solve it.

That solution just might become your next product.

Use Group Brainstorming.  Brainstorming is a technique whereby a group gets together and quickly comes up with many new ideas — no matter how impractical or wacky they may seem.  The goal is to encourage quantity — not quality — of ideas at first.

It’s important not to criticize an idea or point out all the flaws at first — just get the ideas out there.  The idea is to give free reign to your creativity for a period of time, long enough to develop a pool of ideas.

Then once you have some ideas on the table, you and your team can evaluate them and sort them out.  The vast majority of ideas you come up with will be discarded.  But you only need one for a successful new product.

Sometimes the mot amazing product breakthroughs come from the wackiest, most impractical ideas.

Of course, it takes more than ideas alone for a successful business or new product.  But ideas are the starting point.

Ideas sometimes happen when you aren’t looking. Hopeful and ambitious entrepreneurs are always looking, though.

What new product or service idea will you think of now?

Source:  www.sba.gov

 

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