McneelyGossett590

Are you currently an innovative thinker? Try using your creative abilities to study current trends and project those trends in to the future. Future trends are wonderful "seeds" for identifying potentially valuable inventions.

invention

Current Trends

You can develop valuable inventions by taking a look at current trends and projecting those trends into the future. Specifically, current trends are studied to predict in which the trends goes in the future. When projecting a trend into the future, consider all forces that may influence the popularity - economic influences, alterations in technology, changes in business methods (businesses expanding or moving their activities online), and so forth. The way those forces match one another to affect current trends?

As you project current trends in to the future, consider the impact of the trend changes on current services and products. This can be a great chance to make use of your brainstorming, mind mapping, and masterminding techniques to predict in which a trend is headed later on. When looking at future trends, consider:

   What products or services are eliminated by the future trend?
   Does the long run trend create new types of services or products?
   Do the popularity changes enhance or modify existing products or services?
   What new problems are developed by the future trend?

Create Solutions

Develop new inventions by solving problems created by the future trend or by creating new products or services to aid the long run trend. What new products or services will end up commercially feasible as a result of this future trend? Can you identify solutions to the inefficiencies and other issues that arise from the future trend? All of these solutions are potential inventions that could have significant commercial value. Make use of your forward-looking abilities right now to create these inventions.

Example

As one example of an example of projecting current trends, we will reverse time and put inside us the late 1980s. In those days, two popular consumer devices were:

   Personal Computers - Although not nearly as powerful as today, lots of people were using pcs in the late 1980s. Pcs contain storage devices, such as hard disk drives, that store various data used by the computer.
   Video Cassette Recorders (VCRs) were popular consumer devices for recording television programs as well as for playing prerecorded content, such as movies. VCRs use magnetic tapes to store video data.

Picture yourself being an inventor within the late 1980s and also you start considering future trends. You predict that personal computers will continue to improve in computing power, storage capacity, etc. This is reasonable based on the computer advancements seen in previous years. Additionally you take a broad view of a VCR like a "video storage device". Whenever you realize that the hard disk drives in pcs can store any type of data (text data, audio data, video data, and more), you consider the possibility of storing video data (television broadcasts) on a hard disk drive. Thus, hard disk drive turns into a alternative to the tape inside a VCR.

In the late 1980s, the cost of a tough disk drive that could store hrs of video data would probably be way too expensive to a consumer device. However, should you saw the trend that computing power and storage capacity would increase quickly as the price of the computing systems decreased, a future opportunity was possible. Combining this trend using the growth and development of new video compression algorithms that reduced how big video data to become stored, a whole cool product category was made - Video Recorders (DVRs).

A current report indicates that Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) are actually used in 22% of U.S. households - you may have one yourself. What trends are you able to study today that may produce popular services or products in the future?

Do something

Check out current products and services, in addition to current trends, and check out inventing some future services and products. Even though it might take a few years for the technology to evolve in a manner that makes the invention commercially feasible, those inventions might have significant future value.