Ask News.YC: How difficult is it to break out of prevailing paradigms of the present?

The question as I see it is, can we predict the trends of the future? This divides itself into 2 questions: 1) Do we have enough knowledge/creativity to see the next waves of the future, and 2) If we saw a thousand possibilities of what would happen in the future, would we be able to pick the right one?

A different way to see it is that you are the force affecting the future - can you push your design/plan/idea far enough to make it groundbreaking?

What is interesting to me is not answering these questions, but rather, asking -

What can I do to strengthen my ability to answer 'yes' to these questions?

It's just one data point, and I think it's being drawn out way farther than it deserves. Some really inventive things have come out of the automotive industry throughout the years. The hybrids that people are getting into now? They've existed in one form or another since the 1920's (or earlier).

For a modern example of "wow-hey-neat" in automotive design, I like to use the Jeep Hurricane. I'm not wowed by its incredible suspension, the sweet, sweet blend of the new and the familiar in its overall design, or by the really cool transaxle drive train they came up with. What I like about it is that they built this thing with two frickin' engines, and then figured out how to run the engines in banks of four cylinders at a time depending on load. So, driving down the highway? You're on a four cylinder engine. Pulling a gentle hill? Have four more. Pulling a trailer up a steep mud slope? Here, have all 16.

Product design isn't all-revolution-all-the-time. Simply churning is really important; keep on improving your existing design incrementally, as often as you can. Then, when you do get that holy-wow revolutionary design in your head, you do something with it.

But you can't force that.