Necessity is the mother of invention. And pain can be the father of innovation. Whenever you or your customer has a problem, an inconvenience, a difficulty or a pain there is an opportunity for innovation. A new product or service is called for to alleviate the pain.
Nick D’Aloisio is a 16 year old London schoolboy who has just invented a mobile phone app called Summly. He said, “I was revising for a history exam and using Google, clicking in and out of search results, and it seemed quite inefficient. If I found myself on a site that was interesting I was reading it and that was wasting time. I thought that what I needed was a way of simplifying and summarising these web searches. Google has Instant Preview but that is just an image of the page. What I wanted was a content preview.” He created an application that summarises text documents into bullet points that can be easily read on the small screen of a mobile phone.
So far his iPhone app has been downloaded over 115,000 times since being launched a few weeks ago. He has attracted attention from investors in Silicon Valley and China.
More details on this BBC news report.
If you have a problem try coming up with an innovative solution and maybe you will design a winning product. On second thoughts maybe you should ask your teenage children to do it for you.
Paul Sloane
