User:TarraFrampton651

Are you an innovative thinker? Use your creative abilities to review current trends and project those trends into the future. Future trends are great "seeds" for identifying potentially valuable inventions.

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Current Trends

You are able to 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 will go in the future. When projecting a trend in to the future, consider all forces that may influence the trend - economic influences, alterations in technology, changes in business methods (businesses expanding or moving their activities onto the Internet), and so on. The way those forces combine with one another to affect current trends?

As you project current trends in to the future, think about the impact from 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 where a trend is headed in the future. When examining 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 trend changes enhance or modify existing products or services?
   What new troubles are created by the long run trend?

Create Solutions

Develop new inventions by solving problems developed by the long run trend or by creating new items or services to support the long run trend. What new products or services will end up commercially feasible because of this future trend? Can you identify methods to the inefficiencies and other problems that arise in the future trend? All of these solutions are potential inventions that may have significant commercial value. Make use of your forward-looking abilities today to create these inventions.

Example

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

   Personal Computers - Although not as powerful as today, lots of people were using personal computers within the late 1980s. Pcs contain storage devices, for example hard disks, that store various data utilized by the pc.
   Video Cassette Recorders (VCRs) were popular consumer devices for recording television programs and for playing prerecorded content, such as movies. VCRs use magnetic tapes to store video data.

Picture yourself as an inventor in the late 1980s and you start considering future trends. You predict that non-public computers will continue to improve in computing power, storage capacity, etc. This really is reasonable in line with the computer advancements seen in previous years. Additionally you take a broad view of a VCR as a "video storage device". Whenever you realize that the hard hard drives in pcs can store any kind of data (text data, audio data, video data, and more), you think about the possibility of storing video data (television broadcasts) on a hard disk drive. Thus, the hard disk drive turns into a replacement for the tape inside a VCR.

Within the late 1980s, the price of a hard disk drive that could store hrs of video data would probably be far too expensive to someone device. However, if you saw the trend that computing power and storage capacity would increase quickly while the cost 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 the size of video data to become stored, a whole cool product category was made - Video Recorders (DVRs).

A recent report indicates that Video Recorders (DVRs) are now used in 22% of U.S. households - you might have one yourself. What trends can you study today that may produce popular products or services later on?

Take Action

Check out current services and products, in addition to current trends, and try inventing some future services and products. Even though it may take a couple of years for the technology to evolve in a fashion that helps make the invention commercially feasible, those inventions may have significant future value.