Innovative Thinking

The Innovation Zen blog has an interesting post on how to think about future innovation by looking at current products or services, and think about how someone will look back and laugh at this item in the future, when it will be obsolete, similar to the way we would snicker when we look at a teletype machine and think of it as innovative.

This gives some ever so slight structure to innovative thinking over coming up with random thoughts based on tech trends, it helps focus on user needs, and is very simple to use. I just tried it out on a couple of items sitting on my desk and it worked very well. For example take my iPod sitting here: Why will I laugh at this device in the future?

• I actually needed to plug the headphones into the device to listen to it, and the headphones didn't sense my ears and automatically turn on
• I worried about battery life
• I was concerned about running out of space or shifting some content off, as I start to put music, books, pictures and movies on it (I only had a 30GB)
• I couldn't bookmark my audio books or put voice comments and tag them to specific pieces of text
• The figures and pictures from the audio books, or the slide decks from the keynote podcasts were not automatically displaying in the window
• I had to connect it to a pc to move content onto it
• It did not have a wireless connection to the Internet
• and on and on...
  

This took about 2 minutes to write these comments down, all from just a slight shift in the way you think.