Continual Innovation

How do you produce ideas for new innovations? Here is a great technique: Extract some fundamental ideas from existing goods and inventions, and then apply them to new areas.

If you look at a thermostat, for example, you might believe “A device to control the indoor climate.” This is surely an idea that can be used to come up with some thing new. You have to look a little deeper, though, if you want more creative innovations. Continue with, “It measures the temperature and then, using that data, turns the heater on or off, to keep the house comfy.”

Continuing even deeper, we see that it uses measurement in order to control some thing. Let’s work with that idea. With the technologies that exists right now, we can make issues occur automatically, according to practically anything we can automatically measure. This is a powerful idea that can and will lead to some fantastic new innovations.

In an write-up on thought control, I pointed out that because we can measure the changing activity of the brain as we change the nature of our thoughts, we can already create a device that is operated just by our thoughts. Even with the technology of thirty years ago, we could have had a TV turn on whenever one’s pulse rate increased. If you then trained your self to enhance your pulse rate by thinking certain thoughts, you could turn on a television with your thoughts.

Other New Innovations

To have several such ideas and new innovations, just look around and commence applying the fundamental idea of control by measurement. Looking at the television, and thinking of measurable things related to it, time is an obvious 1. There are “sleep timers” that turn the TV off after a particular quantity of time, but how about a device that only allows the TV to be on for 3 hours in any given day? Children can watch when they want, but they won’t be able to watch too a lot.

A thermometer gives me the idea for a sign that changes it’s message according to the weather. A restaurant, for example, could have the sign say “Come in out of the cold,” when it was cold, or “Cool off with an ice cold drink,” when it was hot, and so on. I’m certain there are other companies whose messages would be variously much more or much less efficient according to the weather.

When I look at the traffic, I see that speed can be measured. There are already those radar signs now, that tell you how quick you are going. There could be a sign down the road that says “Slow down, we’re taking your picture,” or the radar gun could turn on a fake siren whenever an individual goes ten miles per hour over the limit. The notion is merely that their speed triggers some thing that will hopefully slow them down.

Yesterday I saw a new invention that measures your girth. So what does it do with that info? Well, if you hold your stomach in, you get clear sound in your headphones. If you let your stomach hang out, the music is low quality and loses volume. While I’m not sure how well this stomach-exercise-motivator will sell, it does show how making use of the concept of measurement to control can lead to really different innovations. In truth, any application of a basic idea to new areas can lead to new innovations.