How To Find A New Product To Develop Within Your Small Business
How do I find a new product to develop?
One is, look for failed products like Joe Cosman did. Products that did not succeed. Another is, and I was amazed at this, is magazines, not only current magazines but old magazines. I'll give you two examples, one with old magazines, one with new ones. I was curious about this when I first heard about mail order and everything, and so I remember all these old products. I went back to the library, and I looked at Popular Science from 1957, '58, and I was amazed at the number of products that could have come out yesterday. You can talk to large companies and the U.S. government. They all have products that they can't do anything with. They don't know what to do with them, for one reason or another. A good example is that, I don't remember the company right now, but during World War II everybody was trying to find a rubber substitute because the Japanese had captured all the sources of rubber, and we really needed a source of rubber. So, an inventor created this great product and it did all kinds of crazy things. It would bounce, it did everything except what it was supposed to. It wasn't a good substitute for rubber though. So it lounged around during World War II. Nobody did anything with it, and then after the war it went someplace else, and then this one guy named Hodgson got hold of this thing, and, you know, he got the product and he did a test, by the way. A very simple test, he took it to a party and everybody had a ball with it and he realized, "What a great toy." Thus the birth of Silly Putty.
