Sometimes, an aspiring innovator just doesn’t know where to start. If you’re such an innovator, how do you even begin to identify the best market or the ideal target customers to innovate a valuable solution for? There just seems to be too many possibilities.
The answer is surprisingly simple. Pick an industry that aligns reasonably well with your skills and/or interests and then land a job there. It doesn’t have to be the best paying or most glamorous job, as your focus will be on much more than just earning a paycheck, improving your skills, or making yourself look better to the next potential employer.
Instead, your paramount goal as a future innovator is to dig deep into your new company to learn where the problems are: where current suppliers’/vendors’ products and services are causing inefficiencies or defects for your company; where your company’s existing processes are breaking down; what employees gripe about (other than their boss, which seems almost universal!), and most importantly, what your company’s customers struggle with, complain about, or begrudgingly tolerate.
Once you’re an employee, in addition to fulfilling your job requirements, you can be on the continual lookout for problems that need to be solved and opportunities that are begging to be exploited. As you learn the pain points of your company and its customers, you can expand your research to learn your industry’s challenges, that is, those problems that extend beyond your company to plague its competitors and their customers as well. All the while, you will be building your network of contacts in your industry, at the supplier, competitor, and customer levels.
As you identify problems and the people who are burdened by them, you can begin to innovate potential solutions. Even better, you can market, research, and test your innovations with those folks to learn how your innovations need to be revised to truly solve their problems and provide the value required by your future target market.But if you hope to break away from your employer to form your own startup, be careful how far you take this approach, because now that you’ve become an employee, your Employment Agreement might prevent you or your future startup from exploiting any innovations you create “on the job”. Some research and innovating might just have to wait until you launch your startup.