Last week I was traveling by train and the man in front of me had his legs stretched towards the corridor. The first time someone comes walking, they step on him. He complains and asks them to watch it. After a while, an old lady comes balancing herself, grabbing the seats as she moves forward. The man sees her, and braces to complain about being stepped on.
There are many ways of solving this problem. Still, it’s much simpler to remove it altogether: sit straight, like a normal human being.
Every entrepreneur has heard the mythical question what problem does your product solve?, and many have built entire business plans around value propositions that focus on solving customer problems. What many people seem to forget is that by solving a problem we introduce others. Switching from one provider to another, changing workflows, adding a new supplier to the list of vetted options.
However, there is another possibility: removing the problem altogether.
I see it happening in many companies that address market inefficiencies or convoluted government bureaucracy. When you explore the root cause of the problem, you’ll notice it’s completely made up by people and their rules, not by a natural phenomenon.
Scipreneurs are not immune to this logic either. Some opportunities exist only temporarily. Today, for example, many useful analytical techniques only work with a given range of concentrations, which forces scientists to either dilute or purify their sample.
Of course, one could focus on those processes as the problem to be solved and develop a new sample preparation instrument.
On the other hand, one could focus on creating an analytical tool that works in the natural regimes achieved at preparation time.
It’s exactly the same market, the same people, essentially the same opportunity size. However one is disruptive and the other is incrementally better. The caveat of removing problems is that in many cases doesn’t lead to a business case, just the adoption of good practices, a policy change, or the implementation of an idea.
If you think about the companies you know, which ones do you think have removed a problem?
