To balance market trends with originality, it's important to have a thoughtful strategy: 1. Use trends as inspiration, not instructions. Look for gaps where your unique solution fits. 2. Focus on customer insights to create products that solve real needs, regardless of trends. 3. Prototype and test your ideas frequently, using feedback to refine originality while staying relevant. 4. Stand out by differentiating through brand values to ensure your product has a clear purpose and identity.

Consider the various innovation horizons that market trends indicate: Short-term: benchmark existing solutions and identify unmet needs or unreached consumers. Key is to identify current whitespaces or incompletely addressed jobs to be done. Medium-term: look at how consumer needs will evolve via research with early adopters or extreme users. Understand trends in mentor categories for your business. Look for ways to borrow ideas from these mentor categories, that offer differentiation with the category. Long-term: multiple trends data (market, consumer, PESTEL, etc) need to be combined to determine future scenarios, and back cast innovation implications. Begin incubating and testing disruptive ideas with early adopters.

Use trend research as inspiration, not instruction: At Xer we research demand and what solutions are currently used, to form our view on how we can contribute. Trends are our springboards—not our blueprints. Sometimes we make bold assumptions about what is the right direction, long before they can be verified. Talk to the customer: Listening closely to our customers’ needs and preferences helps us design drone solutions that meet a need. Real-world input fuels unique solutions that genuinely meet market demands. Continuous testing and iteration: Our product go through rigorous rounds of testing and refinement. With each iteration, we tweak and optimize, keeping a careful eye on maintaining originality while aligning with market shifts.