Blog

Product Trends and Inspiration

Most people who have been engaged in creativity and innovation, at some point, come to realize that cross pollination and lateral thinking are important sources for creating insights and generating breakthrough solutions to complex problems. I imagine most people have come to rely on particular resources for their inspiration and for providing stimulation during the ideation phase of the innovation process. I started to wonder about what these particular sources might be and realized I could do a small experiment using a social network to find out.

In the process of preparing to write this blog post I extended a question to my small network on LinkedIn. I asked people to share with me the kinds of resources they use to identify trends and anticipate the future. Those that chose to participate then submitted a wide range of resources – from people, to blogs, to publications, to trend watching groups, to asking 14 year olds (it’s actually quite a nice list).

I’ve compiled their responses into an open-source, shared data base on Factual.com – a project to create an open data ecosystem. These resource can now be updated and combined with other lists being developed by people around the world. If you are interested in viewing and/or updating this work in progress it can be found at this link.

Patterns Emerged

The compiled list is a reflection of a small group of people and doesn’t claim to be all inclusive nor comprehensive. What is quite remarkable is that most of the sources compiled are free (or have components that are free while providing additional services that can be purchased).

What also stands out in my mind are the resources that weren’t included in the list (some of these I added myself after compiling was complete).

For instance, there were very few resources dealing with sustainability, few dealing with industrial design, one dealing fashion, none dealing with architecture specifically and none specifically related to trends in the retail space.

For instance, the couple of resources focusing on sustainability included Enviu and Flow while they didn’t include a site like World Changing. The list did not include something like Trends Ideas – focused primarily on architecture, interior and landscape design, and kitchens nor did it include a site like Core 77 (focused on industrial design).

So What?

So what’s important about having a rich supply of trend data, and stimulating ideas about the future?

In Langdon Morris’s white paper entitled Innovation Metrics he articulates a model of the innovation process as a funnel. The Ideation phase of the funnel is a really important step in leading to Insight. If we don’t have a process for understanding what we are seeing it’s possible we’ll miss the pattern that is the difference that makes a difference.

As Bryan Coffman, InnovationLabs partner and co-founder writes in his white paper entitled Learning to See,

an important tool in our quest for insight is the ability to uncover principles that organize bodies of knowledge about systems in ways that reveal their underlying patterns.

Further on Bryan writes:

When we look for insights we either want to understand the structure of some aspect of the world—how it’s put together—or we want to know how it works and how it produces the behaviors that we see and experience. The object of the former inquiry is a body of knowledge, while that of the latter inquiry is a system in focus.

What is possibly more important than having resources and a plethora of ideas about the future is the process we use to mine those trends and turn them into patterns and insights.

The bottom line: it’s important to have a rich ideation process as part of an overall innovation process but having the right process to lead to insights is potentially more important.