Should I look at previous products for ideas?

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman, CEO and founder of Peterman Design Firm. And on today's episode, we're going to talk about looking at previous products for inspiration before developing a new one. I get this asked by a lot of people that are, you know, their real concern is, well, I don't want to be copying somebody else's design because I know it's patented or it's protected. And I don't want to just be a copycat. I want to be developing something new. And so a lot of people have some concern of, well, should I even look? Should I be studying other designs? Should I be like, how much should I spend in looking at and understanding other products before creating my own? Or working with a development partner, how much do we look at those old products? products. And so something I— in our process, we work with, you know, the design research. It is heavily about looking at everything that's already out there. That's one, one very large component. And, you know, if you don't look, it actually means you could accidentally copy somebody else's design. And obviously we want to stay away from intentionally copying somebody's design because that leads to patent infringement and lawsuits and nobody likes that. So we want to be aware of what's been done before, and it also can help spur new innovation. You can look at an existing product, and a lot of products are inspired on a previous product. You know, take electric cars, for example. They are obviously inspired by Oh, gas cars. And those were inspired, you know, the first gas cars were a sort of version of looking at maybe a wagon and a train engine at the time and putting them together and make it smaller. So there's— you can't move forward without looking at least a little bit back and having a good idea of what's out there, what has worked, understanding, well, these 5 products launched and they're really successful. These 3 over here, not so much. Well, understanding what those differences are, how, how those products worked, what was the reason of failure— was it marketing or was it the product itself? Was it just a bad product? Did it have— was just missing a feature? The only difference between 2 of these is this one had extra feature X and this one did not. What is that difference? So a lot of that research is going to help you figure out What is a good path forward? And, you know, something when we do design research and we were working on a new product, we look at what's existed before. We look at, here's these things, here's these products out here, these are the things that they do, here's their features, here's, here's features that nobody uses, here's a feature that literally no one knew about, like nobody uses it because it wasn't advertised or it wasn't spoken about. Things like that. It's like you never knew this product had this feature, and you want to make sure that you understand all of that. And from a legal basis, when you go to a patent attorney, they're going to look at every patent that's been done already. That's how they determine whether you can get a new patent, is making sure that you're not infringing on anybody else's patent. So you want to do the same thing with design. You don't want to Copy design. And if you aren't aware of what has been designed and what products are out there, then you can't create something new. You are playing with a blank piece of paper and not realizing that somebody else has already drawn 10 things on it, and you need to make sure you know what those things are. And so, with that said, you know, you're not going to end up copying everybody. When you do that, you're gonna—you are gonna be inspired. And there's a there's a line to be tread of I'm inspired by and I'm copying. And you that line is the difference between a you know a Rolls Royce and a Bentley. If you look at those two car companies, which is quite fascinating, they're they used to be one; they split. Their cars are pretty similar. They have. You know, you look at them, you probably, you probably could get a couple of them mixed up with each other, but they're actually 2 different companies and they aren't infringing on each other. So, you know, they, they play this dance, right, of, okay, well, they do this and we do this. And every, you know, every car company does that. Everybody that makes pens, pens are not usually that unique. But if you don't know what's out there, you could end up designing a Bic pen again exactly because you didn't know what a Bic pen looked like. So our research and the way I do this with clients is we want to be aware so we can steer and say, okay, well, these people have designed all these things over here, which is super great, and there's an opening right here. We— nobody's designed anything like this. And that's how we're able to evaluate, hey, you have an idea, you want to work with us, great, let's see if that idea is viable. Let's see if it's been done before. Well, you have to go look at everybody else's work. And when you do that, you get an understanding of, okay, well, yeah, somebody has done something fairly similar, but if we make these changes, then we can move your product out of being a copycat type product and we move into innovation space. And that's how you're able to guide the product development process into developing innovative new products that solve new problems. And some old ones too, hopefully, and creates a more successful product development process for you. So I hope this answers the question. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers. And if you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed and like the video. If you wanna learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, petermanfirm.com. You'll find link and information in the description. And of course, we're on all social media as well, so check us out there. All right, thank you. Thank you.