A number of businesspeople mistakenly equate the concepts of creativity and innovation with mindless fun and playful fooling around. While it’s indeed conducive for the end result if you have fun and enjoyment while undergoing the creative process, we engage in creative endeavors for serious reasons. Creativity and innovation are not ends in themselves. Their ultimate objective is to create meaningful new value. In today’s article, let’s get a better understanding of the concepts of value creation and meaning.
Guy Kawasaki, a Silicon Valley-based Venture Capitalist, former Apple Fellow and author of the book The Art of the Start, relates the following advice to wanna-be entrepreneurs: “The core of entrepreneurship is about making meaning. Many people start companies to make money — the quick flip, the dot.com phenomenon. I have noticed that those companies that are fundamentally founded to change the world, to make this world a better place, to make meaning, are the companies that make a difference. They are the ones that succeed. My naïve and romantic belief is that if you make meaning, you probably make money. But if you set out to make money, you will probably not make meaning and you won’t make money. So you need to make meaning — that should be the core of why you start a company.” Similarly, making meaning — and not making money — is at the core of creativity and innovation.
Now what exactly does it mean: Making meaning? And how can we do it? Making meaning implies adding significance or value to something; doing something that is novel, relevant, appropriate, worthwhile and highly useful.
For example, in the context of Bangkok, you probably agree that opening another spa or Internet café does not create much value, while coming up with an innovative traffic and transportation concept for the metropolis represents a significant value proposition. As Guy Kawasaki points out, making meaning is all about making our world a better place. We can achieve this noble objective by following one of three paths toward meaningful value creation:
1. Look for ways to increase the quality of life. Many truly great innovations in the history of humanity greatly increased the quality of people’s lives. Can you imagine what our daily lives looked like in a world without computers? Without mobile phones or the Internet? Without air-conditioning or electric lighting? Without the airplane, car, other means of transportation, or even roads? Clearly, we need to bear this path in mind as we embark on a new innovation project. So ask: How can we increase the quality of life of our customers with what we’re doing? Over 100 million sold products testify to the significance of how the iPod has increased the quality of life of music lovers around the world.
2. Right a wrong. The second path toward meaning is to identify a wrong that you can right. Take notice of problems that you encounter as you go through life, note down these problems in a “Bug List,” and look for ways to turn these bugs into business or innovation opportunities. What are bugs that annoy you and need to be fixed? What does not work as well as it should? What is poorly designed and needs improvement? What wider unmet — and often unarticulated — need has not yet been addressed by the market? What really sucks — and could be influenced and changed for the better by you? Online music is a good example here: First, at the beginning of the new millennium, the emergence of P2P-sharing services (to freely exchange music) addressed a wider need to easily find your favorite songs online. In October 2003, Apple righted another wrong by offering a legal way to acquire songs online with the opening of the iTunes Music Store.
3. Prevent the end of something good. These days, the world is changing very fast. People vary greatly in their perception of which of these changes are good, and which ones are bad. This points to a third way to make meaning: preventing the end of something good. Is there something good, beautiful, wonderful that is about to come to an end due to changes in the environment? That is being eroded, being changed, being discontinued, or being ruined to your great dissatisfaction or even anger? If you just cannot stand the fact that something good is about to end — once again, turn the problem around into an opportunity to start a business, an innovation project or a social movement. For example, in Africa, national parks with premium safari lodges help to preserve the beauty of the African wilderness while creating job opportunities for the locals and tourism income for the country and its entrepreneurs.
Conclusion: “Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success,” noted Thomas Edison. Like Guy Kawasaki, the world’s greatest inventor understood: To make money, first focus your innovation efforts on making meaning. Make it your prime motivation to engage in creativity and your main judgment criterion to decide if an activated idea is an innovation success or not. When will you start making meaning and creating value propositions that truly make this world a better place?
© Dr. Detlef Reis 2009. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 8 April 2009.