What would you guess is the first position of management when you suggest you should license your patents to competitors, share your under-utilized trade secrets with threatening startups, and investigate the possibilities of collaboration with your cousins in aligned segments?
Increasingly, successful products all have a new must-have feature, and that is “beauty”. I don’t know if you’ve recognized it yet, but everyone seems to be extolling the virtues of their “beautiful” design lately, and I know that personally, when I’m choosing software, for example, I always want to see what it looks like before I’ll be bothered to download.
Ideas are always a creative response to a problem without a present-day solution. People dream them up as the wonder what they might do to solve their problems, and they draw on inspirations from their environments around them to do so. What people forget is that neither their problems, nor the inspirations from which they draw solutions, are exclusively theirs. Everyone else is likely to face almost the same challenges. And they’ll certainly come up with similar solutions.