Innovation and Super Normal Thinking

Some quotes from an article by Dave Morin about innovation and Super Normal thinking in Startup Notes:

When you set out to create a new product, you usually do not start by trying to think of something completely new. You think of a product or concept that is already “normal” to the world, and then try to make it better. You make it Super Normal. To apply Super Normal thinking we start by looking at what is normal and then ask the question: What are the key problems?

After mentioning some examples of innovations:

(…) In each of these cases, the innovator did not invent the category. They simply took what was “normal”, and added a twist. They added an innovation. The innovation solved a key problem of the “normal” use case that we all already understood. (…) In each case, the innovator built on top of concepts which had already been iterated upon billions and billions of times in social systems. Too often we make the mistake of trying to use concepts in our products, and thus words in our interfaces, which have no current meaning to users. As an innovator with limited resources, building a new concept is not something you can usually afford to do.

innovation

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