Why Most New Product Ideas Fail: Our Brains are to Blame

ZURICH (October 2, 2014) – According to creativity and innovation expert Andrey Schukin, once we focus on developing our own product idea, our brains tend to delete most of the information that comes from the market. Frustrated with the success ratio of the new products, Schukin has developed and launched the Innovation Deck — a new set of playing cards for engineers and inventors. It provides an effective “brain hack” that helps product creators to quickly re-focus on the customer and generate a wide variety of solutions, allowing the creators to avoid spending months on developing a solution that has no potential.

It is frighteningly challenging to create new inventions and products. Very few awarded patents actually find their way to realization in the form of new products. And that’s not all: according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, for those products that get through the hurdles of development and manufacturing, and are launched to the market, over 90 percent will fail in the first four years.

Why is it so difficult to create commercially viable products? According to Schukin, our brains are to blame.

“Our brains are built up in such a way that we delete most of the information that comes our way,” he says. “We’re deletion machines. For example, if right now you are focused on reading an article online, you are likely to delete most of the information around you. You might not notice the noise of the computer fan, or how warm your right foot feels, until I mention it.”

He says that a similar thing happens when we develop products: once we get a product idea that we believe in, we focus on it. And as we put our idea into the spotlight, we tend to delete everything else. We are so laser-focused on developing our solution, we ignore the inputs from the market and whether there is a better way to add value to the customer.

Schukin says we should consciously look for ways to stop for a minute and re-evaluate customers’ problems and the possible solutions available to us. After working with many small and large businesses on product development, and seeing people miss crucial customer inputs, he decided to create the Innovation Deck. These playing cards, designed for engineers and inventors, contain a set of novel questions and techniques that allow our minds to stop for a minute and re-evaluate the future product.

The Innovation Deck has just been launched as a crowdfunding project on IndieGoGo and can be downloaded at http://igg.me/at/InnovationDeck/x/

Contact Information

Andrey Schukin

Founder

Innovation Fast

Contact via E-mail