What Problem Are You Actually Solving?

Understanding the Problem

When an inventor describes a new idea, the explanation often begins with the invention itself. What it does, how it works, what makes it different, or what feature has been added to an existing product. That is understandable. The inventor has spent time thinking about the solution, and the solution is usually the part that feels most interesting.

But the solution is not necessarily the starting point for understanding whether there is an opportunity.

Before asking whether an invention can be developed into a product, it is worth asking a more basic question: what problem is the invention actually solving?

That question can be surprisingly difficult to answer. An inventor may begin with a particular inconvenience, frustration, inefficiency, safety issue, cost, or limitation and develop a solution around it. During development, however, the original problem can become buried beneath the features of the invention. The conversation gradually becomes about the product rather than the reason anyone would need it.

This is where some early validation becomes useful. Instead of asking people whether they like the invention, ask about the situation that led to the invention in the first place. How do they currently deal with the problem? How often does it occur? What does the existing solution cost them in time, money, effort, inconvenience, or risk? Have they already tried something else?

Those questions can produce much more useful information than a simple expression of interest.

Someone saying that an invention is a good idea does not necessarily mean that they have the problem, that the problem matters to them, or that they would change their current behavior to solve it. Conversely, someone explaining how they currently work around a problem may provide evidence that the underlying need is real, even if they are not immediately enthusiastic about the particular solution being shown to them.

That distinction is important because early validation is not supposed to prove that an inventor's idea is wonderful. It is supposed to reduce uncertainty.

The problem itself should also be examined carefully. Sometimes the inventor has identified a genuine problem, but the proposed solution addresses only one part of it. Sometimes the problem exists but is too infrequent to justify a new product. Sometimes people have already found an acceptable workaround. In other cases, the problem is significant, but the proposed product introduces a different difficulty that may prevent adoption.

None of these findings necessarily means that the invention should be abandoned. They provide information about what needs to change, what needs to be tested, or what needs to be understood more clearly.

This is one reason it is useful to separate assumptions from evidence during development. An inventor might believe that a particular group experiences a problem, that the problem is sufficiently important, and that the proposed solution is preferable to the alternatives. Those may all be reasonable assumptions. They are still assumptions until something provides evidence for them.

The process of turning an invention into a viable product involves continually replacing those assumptions with better information. Sometimes that information comes from technical testing. Sometimes it comes from potential users. Sometimes it comes from manufacturing research, intellectual property work, market investigation, or simply discovering that an earlier assumption was wrong.

The important thing is to ask the right question at the right time.

An invention does not have to solve every problem surrounding a situation. It does, however, need a clear reason for existing. Understanding that reason makes it easier to determine who might need the product, what alternatives already exist, what the product needs to do, and which parts of the idea need further validation.

Before spending more time improving the solution, go back to the problem.

It may tell you more about the invention than another round of features ever could.