Why innovation still needs a market

Your product won’t change the world without a customer

When you’re building something that you believe in, your dream is to innovate.

It could be something that has the power to shake the foundations of everything that has come before it, or just a simple idea that keeps you awake at night, over a problem you know you can solve.

Starting out in entrepreneurship, that’s exactly what drove me. Innovation was more than a buzzword. It was where I drew my spirit and my joy and my excitement to wake up and make. As an engineer, and as a scientist, I’ve never lost that love.

Innovative thinking requires you to shake off the shackles of the standard and systemised and popularly accepted thought processes and patterns that you’ve been imprinted with. It requires you to conceptualise without limits. It needs you to unlearn, or even better to just learn enough to not to become biased.

But a limit that you have to learn to work with, is the market. That's the real, honest truth that innovators need to face. The market is what enables you to create, and it serves as a guide for where we go, and how we get there. The market is important, and you cannot ignore it.

“Build it and they will come” is not a long-term plan

The world is an incredibly crowded place. There are new products released all the time, and new ideas unveiled to the world, and they’re all competing with a busy, noisy, static filled headspace. History is littered with inventions and ideas that people just didn’t need - or at least, didn’t need enough to buy (fact: there are more than 3 million patent applications registered each year globally).

Laser discs. PlayStation phones. Fridges that can run Twitter.

Just because an idea exists, whether or not that idea is good, or it’s exciting, or it’s an idea can move your personal creative energy, doesn’t mean that it will find a home with its customers. It has to solve a big enough problem so that others want to give you their time and money to own what you have to offer. It has to have a place in the market.

We can’t just build for the sake of building

Resources are not infinite. In fact, they are extremely limited. And when you’re asking people to invest theirs in what you’re building, you can’t use sheer curiosity as a reason. I have a sense of curiosity that is incredibly strong, almost an innate part of my pattern. It’s strong enough that when I’m under pressure, finding a spark that can stimulate that curiosity is the way to keep me pushing forward.

But for most people, that just won’t be enough.

As much as we’d love to do research for the sake of research and make things for the sake of making things, there needs to be a return in order to justify the labour, the cost and the extensive R&D that true innovation demands.

You can make the world a better place. But you have to be able to sell that vision!

Innovation can change everything. Tech, built on innovation, can transform societies. But to get people on board with that change and that paradigm shift, you do need to be able to sell the shift to the broader public and to the people who will enact and feel its impact on their lives. There has to be an element of marketability in whatever you build that can empower you to make that sale. Movements can be built on the back of it, and that’s a hugely powerful thing.

Innovation is a human good. it's a necessity for human race to progress. It always has been, quite a long time before it became a buzzword. We need it. I believe in it. It’s why I decided to spend the rest of my life making innovation accessible to broader public. But it’s not an absolute good, and it needs to be tempered and forged with elements that bring out its positivity and its edge.

If you can find a market, if you can innovate for that market, if the people are out there who are ready to buy - you can do anything.