In visible pain, hidden opportunities: the many roads to disruptive innovation

In a recent article, Luke Williams, a fellow at Frog Design, argues that you can't find opportunities to innovate simply by watching for glaring problems and fixing them. Rather, you have discern more subtle problems that hide in plain sight. 

'Instead of large pain points, you should spend your time looking for--and addressing--something much more subtle: small “tension points,” the things that aren’t big enough to be considered problems. The challenge, however, is that tension points are usually hard to spot, because the symptoms are easy to overlook. They’re not screaming for attention the way “real” problems are. They’re typically little inconveniences that people have grown complacent about.' - L. Williams. 

A simple but classic example of this is the disruptive innovation that Dutch Boy created in the area of paints - not with a new paint formulation but with a new paint can design.

This helped them leap-frog their competition due to their seeming ability to look at their customer's latent need for a container that homeowners (not house painters) could use.