Unintended Uses of Innovations
blog | philmckinney | November 1, 2007 at 11:06 pm
Have you ever noticed that many innovations end up being used in ways never contemplated by the inventors. Some interesting examples include:
| Invention | Original Use | Actual Primary Use |
| Telephone | Broadcast audio content to consumers | 1:1 communications |
| Radio | 1:1 communication to consumers | Broadcast advertising based content to consumers |
| TV | Replace movies | Followed the radio market with advertising |
| Cable | Improved picture quality | Premium priced content |
| VCR | Record TV shows | Purchase/Rent movies |
A mistake many innovators make is to fall in love with the original application of their idea and closed to other possible uses. One way to avoid this is to prototype your idea in such a way that your customer can experiment and find their own application for it.
Put these prototypes in front of your customers and observe (empathic design) how they use it. Don’t lead. Don’t correct them in how to use it "correctly". Let them self discover how you idea solves a problem they are having.
Try it and you will be amazed what you will find out.
Question: What other inventions can you come up with that became successful when the actual application was something not anticipated?
Tags: unintended innovations
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Post it notes. Wasn’t 3M trying to develop a super-sticky adhesive but instead got this “useless” semi-sticky one?
SMS text message on cell phones: this service was at first provided to alert the phone owner of a voice mail or for engineers to test mobile-to-mobile communication.
Although different systems lets to email electronic mail, it’s interesting to note that some folks started exchanging messages through FTP (without exchanging more than lines of text and no file transfer)… using FTP as an email platform (before the invention of email protocol)