Most people’s approach to innovation. Yours too?

How about:

A Virtual Reality game where everything is built just as the gamer is exploring their environment. By applying Machine Learning–situations, characters and objects are being created using a mix of randomness and the gamer’s choices, in a way that maximizes pleasant surprises and builds a story that, every time you progress, it gets better (as in tailored to your likes). On top of everything, the currency unlocked inside the game through increasingly complex challenges is a coin traded on cryptocurrency markets and can be exchanged for real value in the real world.

Just imagine how cool this would be, the millions of people playing it, the phenomenon it would create.

We will be rich!

It took me exactly 5 minutes to think this up.

And this is how most new ideas show up.

Let’s call it brute-force ideation.

You take a hammer (e.g. a trend) and smash it into whatever is closest to your area of knowledge. Sometimes not even your area, but something you think you understand. In the example above: gaming.

I’ve played some games. That doesn’t even remotely qualify me as understanding gaming. It just feels you understand it.

And this is one of the many reasons most start-ups fail.

In fact, it depends on when you label something as “failed.” The idea above has already failed because it will never be built by any rational person (hopefully).

While the story can be fine-tuned to sound believable and at a certain point of complexity receive investment (angel, venture, crowdfunding), it has some deep flaws:

• The first experiences with it would be bad. It would take several playthroughs until the Machine Learning Algorithm would understand what you like. This means a decent amount of time spent up-front by the gamer just to start having a half-decent experience playing.

• VR games aren’t that good right now and it would take a few more years of both market adoption and technological advancement (including the slower, market dependent, hardware part).

• There would have to be a limited amount of cryptocurrency.

Now, if you take all the smartest and experienced people you can find from all the different fields above, you might have an increased chance of building something that would work.

But for all these experts, the underlying element should be a deep knowledge of what needs the end-customer has. Without this deep knowledge about needs, only about technical aspects (which is very common), the whole process becomes a missed shot.

Let’s validate there’s a need that can fuel our crazy ideas first. – Your mind, from now on.