The search for meaning

Added value is all the rage these days, but why is no one talking about added crap? The developed world is suffering from product bulimia. We honestly do not need more stuff. Every time a producer brings a new little gadget or gizmo to the world we as consumers have to live with a dubious family reunion of technological cousins. Personally, I have entire drawers filled with added crap: Manuals, cords, wires, boxes – and I can’t throw them out cause then I’m definitely going to need them.

The road ahead in four stages

An organization exists because it creates value. A healthy, sustainable company develops and grows when it creates meaningful value. There are three sources of growth: increased efficiency, takeovers and innovation, and in today’s world, it hardly seems possible to squeeze any more out of the first two aspects. Innovation – the process of creating value through good ideas – is becoming the best path to happiness and prosperity.

In the world of innovation there is two common misunderstandings:
1) Development is technology-driven, and
2) If the producers feel they make great products and services, the customer will agree.

To create value, you have to complete 4 stages: meaning, solution, product and technology.

Technology may be the microchip, the product the mobile phone, the solution people’s ability to communicate across great distances, but meaning is what we experience and what we create when we apply the technology, use the product, and implement the solution. Meaning is the most crucial step, and it is meaning that determines whether one’s innovation investment pays off. Unfortunately, it is far more common to turn priorities upside down: falling in love with a new technology, turning it into a product, claiming that the product is a solution and having an advertising agency spread the joyous message. Preferably leaving out meaning entirely.

And the world is flooded with technological products looking for meaning. Waiting for meaning. Waiting for the right time. The right market. The right people. Waiting for the world to change.

Chance favours the prepared mind. But why wait for chance? Why wait for change? When there are so many opportunities and so many people needing a bit of happiness out there?

Tampons and can-openers

Meaningful innovation seldom springs from focus group surveys or technological feasibility. Innovation is much more a matter of being able to see the unspoken needs and timing the creation of solutions = having the proper understanding of the right people at the right time and place. Tampax is an excellent historic example.

Traditionally, the female period has not been an appropriate topic for conversation. Even now, it is still “a dangerous thing“, pictured with blue blood in commercials, from which women have to be “protected”. In the old days, affluent women had a small travel stove for burning their soiled remains, and otherwise the condition called for plastic aprons, lambskins and old rags. So when the first tampons were marketed (the basic idea not much different from the 2000 year old Egyptian style), it certainly was a meaningful idea, with potential relevance for half the world’s population. But it was not possible to ask women, as no one would discuss it. The first boxes even included a note saying ”please hand me a box of tampons”, so that nice ladies did not have to embarrass themselves in front of the clerk.

It took 40 years from canning was invented till the can-opener was patented. The can and the can opener are both technological products; put together they give us a meaningful solution. As soon as it exists, it is obvious, but you can’t ask people to say ”can-opener”, when the can-opener does not exist.

Meaningful organisations on the rise

Meaningful innovation also implies the potential for creating huge added value and tapping in to the original, potential of human beings. The Specialists is a company that only hires people with Autism Spectrum Disorders as its core staff. The founder of the Specialists had a son diagnosed as a three year old, and went on to create the workplace where his child could have a dignified job when he grew up. The meaningfulness of The Specialists is not profit or productivity. It is a father’s gift to his son. And to demonstrate to society that people with ASD can develop as equal contributors. Today, they are not even equal to their competitors – they are actually much better. And experts travel from all over the world to learn how to create a workplace that drives the best out of a group of people formerly labeled as .. well added crap.

So ask yourself: what is the meaningfulness of what you do? This is where the future lies.