Reddit mentions of Something Really New: Three Simple Steps to Creating Truly Innovative Products

Everything is over crowded. Even if you don't have any direct competition, your potential customers are inundated with choices to spend their money on that aren't you. People spend way too much time thinking about how inundated a market is. And not enough time thinking about how they can truly innovate and differentiate themselves.

Your description of what you're trying to solve is this: I have a group of friends and we'd like to buy a gift for one of our friends.

I might break that task into a series of steps:

1. Find out that it's my friends birthday.
   
2. Ask myself if I have any current ideas.
   
3. Mention those ideas to my friends.
   
4. Ask my friends if they have any current ideas.
   
5. If there are some ideas at this point, take a vote to get a consensus on what we're buying.
   
6. If we have no ideas, then we need to brainstorm. A good place is to figure out if my friend has picked up any new hobbies or interests. Look at Facebook/Twitter.
   
7. Ask my friends if they know of any new interests of this person.
   
8. Ask someone close to this person if they have any new interests.
   
9. If I still have nothing, I might ask the person if they've been doing anything new. Maybe indirectly over a beer or coffee.
   
10. Now we have some ideas. Now we vote on these ideas.
    
11. Now someone has to buy it.
    
12. Collect money from everyone.
    
    And on and on this goes.
    
    To innovate, just start eliminating or combining steps. Figure out something in this list where you could start making things easier. It sounds like your thinking along some of the right lines, but what if your algrorithm comes up short. Maybe it should also anonymously message the person or the person's closest friend about hobbies they've been into.
    
    You could eliminiate the voting steps above. Make that list of suggested gifts some kind of Reddit style list so I know what my friends would prefer we get as a group.
    
    This is the thinking exercise I've been using with Draft software I've created to help people write better. There's a million word processors and distraction free editors out there. But I spend a lot of time just analyzing the tasks I have as a writer and all the steps those tasks have.
    
    I've been able to create a tool that's very different than other online editors. Google Docs doesn't have on-demand copy-editing. But that's a common task writers have. So I built it in.
    
    If you spend enough time drilling into tasks people have, there's all sorts of areas you can innovative. I highly recommend an easy read and a great kick in the ass along this line of thinking: Something Really New.