Almost every article about innovative ideas promises inspiration and delivers a list of trends. The problem is that a trend is not an idea — it is context. The idea appears when someone looks at a concrete nuisance and asks why it is still like that. This piece is about where to find that nuisance.
Look where there is a workaround
An improvised adaptation is a symptom. When someone tapes a sensor in place, draws a mark on the floor or keeps a spreadsheet running alongside the official system, there is a need right there that the available product does not meet.
Workarounds are especially valuable because they come pre-validated: someone already invested effort to solve the problem. The question stops being “is there demand?” and becomes “can this be solved properly?”.
Look where the data does not exist
A great deal of industrial and laboratory process is still run on perception. The operator knows by the sound that the machine is out of tune; the technician knows by the colour that the reaction has reached its point. That knowledge is real and valuable — and it disappears when the person leaves.
Instrumenting what is today perception turns tacit knowledge into data. It is one of the most fertile origins of a project, and it usually demands less technology than people assume.
Look where accessibility fails
Equipment designed for the average user excludes whoever falls outside the average. Products and adaptations that expand the autonomy of people with disabilities represent an agenda poorly served by the market and technically rich: they demand ergonomics, sensing and testing with real users.
It is also the agenda where testing with the person who will use it is not optional. An accessibility idea conceived without the participation of the person who has the disability almost always misses.
Look where cost blocks adoption
There are solutions that work and do not spread, because of price. Reducing cost is not lesser innovation: it is what decides whether the technology reaches the small producer, the public school, the laboratory with no budget. Often the path is replacing an imported component with a domestic equivalent, or swapping conventional manufacturing for additive manufacturing at small scale.
How to know whether the idea holds
Three questions usually separate an idea from a wish:
- Who feels this pain today, and how often?
- What does that person currently do to work around the problem?
- If the solution existed tomorrow, would they swap their current workaround for it? Why?
If you cannot answer the second question, you probably have not yet spoken to whoever has the problem — and that is the step that precedes any prototype.
Once the idea passes those three questions, bring it to LIPS. That is the point where prototyping stops being a bet and becomes a method.