How do companies get new product ideas?

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman. I'm CEO and founder of the Peterman Design Firm. And today's episode, we're going to talk about how companies, not startups or inventors, but actual established companies find and develop new product ideas. And there's 3 kind of 3 ways that, in my opinion, are how ideas come together and are then developed into actual products. So the first is, you know, kind of the inventor path. And, you know, we're not talking about inventors, but inventors work at companies too. So that's just, oh, I have an idea, present it, and companies have— there's companies that have contact forms, have idea submissions. There's companies that run idea competitions or design competitions in order to get basically submissions of ideas. So that's one way of, you know, they can gather it from the public or they can have their own internal think tank, whether it's specific employees where you really are part of a think tank and your whole job is to come up with new product ideas, for a company, or whether it's just an open-door policy of submitting, and any employee can submit ideas to create a new product. And even big, big companies like Intel have implemented this, and some of the— some amazing cost-saving ideas or new products have been generated inside of these companies because They allow people to do that and they often incentivize their employees. And that kind of approach produces lots of great ideas. So there's the invention path. Then there is what I consider the marketing path of, you know, marketing has its directive, marketing, sales, its whole department goal is to make more products and make more money and help the company grow. And, you know, you can do that in a very conscious way where marketing is looking at, well, how do we improve the lives of people? How do we do this? You know, but you can also have it just, you know, money-driven, not as good. And, but the whole approach is that you look at the market and this is, you know, inventing is where you come up with groundbreaking new ideas that no one has ever thought of before. The market path is where you come up with ideas that fit into a market hole. So that's where, you know, iPhone— you have, you have your iPhone. Well, now they come up with iPhone that's smaller, larger iPhone, or, you know, they bring back an old version of an iPhone. That has to do with marketing, looking, looking at the market and saying, Well, we can sell this large phone. That's super great. But we see that the market really wants a smaller phone too. Now there's nothing huge there developmentally. They, they're not inventing a new thing, but you are creating a new product. It's going to require different tooling. It's a different form factor. It may even require some different software, right? So you end up creating and developing a new product idea. But it's, it's just there to fill a hole. You know, it's like a company is producing a knife and a spoon and they go, what other products can we come up with? And the next logical one is, oh, let's make a fork. Now we'll have a spoon, a knife, and a fork. We'll have a whole set. So that's what marketing— the marketing approach is, is looking at the market, looking at the needs, and then filling a gap in the market. And, you know, the driving factor behind that can be anything, but it really comes down to, is there a market gap? Let's make something to fill this hole and capture additional revenue, ideally while solving a problem. The other kind of side, you know, the invention side, it can be blue sky. It doesn't have to solve a specific problem necessarily. It may not even be problem-specific. In how it's created, but then we also have more of a user-centric form where the reason the product— it's a specific need. It's not necessarily a huge— it's not a market hole. You're not just creating another version of a product in order to capture a little bit more market. You're not just copying, you know, your version of somebody else's product. Isn't just going out. What you're doing is you're looking at you know, a specific problem. So, you know, this is something where you're going to create a new version possibly. So you could look at like the OXO brand and how they created their kitchen tools and kitchen utensils around the idea of creating something— their original thing was making a product that somebody who was Old, has arthritis, would be able to actually open a can. They'd be able to actually use utensils that they couldn't be able to use previously, or really hard to. And so what they were doing is this user-centric side of, we have a problem, we're going to design a solution to solve the problem. It's not a market hole. We're not just coming up with really cool ideas. We're, we're solving a very, very, very specific problem. And there's a lot of innovation that could come here. Teleportation, like on a scale of this, teleportation is over here. We don't need it. There's not an actual problem. Nobody is trying to get from here instantly. That's not an actual need right now. Need is where this user-centric need is, where there's an existing need. And that's why, you know, marketing market says, oh, there's a little bit of a need. There might not— nobody, nobody before OXO has said, oh, the market really needs this product. But there was a need. There's a, there's a need and reality of people's experience. And so that this kind of design comes from studying. The reason I call it user-centric, and it's like conscious design approach, is It looks at needs of specific users. And so you end up niching very much down. So that's where highly niche products often come from because they're solving a very specific need and not a more broad market level. And obviously OXO has blown up. It's doing very well. I'm pretty sure I have some in my kitchen and I don't have any arthritis. But that was their core. That was their core start. And now They're all over. So having it, having that core can lead to, you know, now they do market hole fill where they say, oh, we don't have a product like that, let's make a version of our product for them. And so these 3 approaches are how companies do it, and that's how you can do it. So you can approach it in these 3 ways, though market hole really requires you to have company, because it means what you're looking at is I have a product here, I have products here. No, there's a hole right here. I don't have a product in this space, but it fits within my brand, it fits within the market, my users. And the other part of it is your users, whoever your customers are, your users are, your customers' market, market filling. You feel a little hole in your market It's not typically to get into a new market. It's to simply say, well, I have this customer base. What's another product I can sell to my existing customer base? That's why you do a smaller iPhone or an iWatch or, you know, your, your Apple Watch or, you know, different product variations that are targeted towards your market. So I hope that gives you some ideas. And, you know, while, while we're talking about large companies can do this, you can still use some of these strategies to create your own ideas, your own solutions, and develop your own products. And hopefully we'll, we'll see one of your products someday come out.