By Stephen Wunker
Latent needs are all around us. Is your life perfect? I didn’t think so. Sometimes people are over-served by what the market provides (I don’t understand 99% of the functions in Excel) and oftentimes they’re under-served or completely ignored. Life is full of unmet needs and moments of joy that are too fleeting. If you run a business today, some of these opportunities will relate
to your company.
In 2000, I was responsible for developing one of the first smartphones. We spent a long time creating lofty designs for the product, which involved a lot of risky new technologies.
During our team meetings a bunch of engineers kept sending each other notes over clunky two-way pagers. So annoying! Of course, it was also so telling if I had just looked at the situation the right way. We didn’t need to make a complex and expensive product, just something that allowed people to send notes. The Blackberry came out around then. Its inventors clobbered messaging, rather than pondering all that a product could possibly do.