Christmas Gift Ideas
Why we have an abundance of innovative products now and what we can do to make sure it continues.
This Christmas there are more options than ever in gift giving. This is largely a result of the constant innovations that have resulted in the production of innovative new products and the ready availability of credit which makes the items easily achievable for the average person.
The innovations are happening at unprecedented pace and are filtering down to the consumers quickly as well. The flat panel screens and plasma TVs are a good example where theses items are now cheaper than ever and easily affordable for the average family. For many years, there was little reason to replace a perfectly-operating TV but now there is. In the area of robotics, in Japan they recently had a robotics show. At this show, there were impressive developments in creating robots for training dental hygiene staff with robots that can react to pain and baby robots that react to typical baby issues for use with new mothers. Last years iRobot was an example of this technology brought to the consumer.
The availability of credit has been the complementary aspect which has allowed the innovation to be particularly active and the resulting products to be easily affordable by the consumer. For the past several years, Americans have been cashing out on their home equity (among other borrowings) and have been able to finance their consumption. The purchase of items including innovative new products in the past have given a signal to new and existing companies creating innovate new products to continue with their R&D. Thus this year they are able to produce even a greater number of innovative products than in the past even though we now have a credit crisis in the subprime market and in housing. The past spending is propelling todays availability of products and todays spending for these goods may be affected by the credit problems to show up in the future but today there is an abundance of new innovative products as a result of the past.
So this Christmas we should take advantage of the abundance of innovative products and also help support the economy and further innvation for products for future Christmases.
