Seeking engagement through innovation to galvanize growth

October 1, 2012Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Foster Performance, innovation execution delivery, Leading innovation, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

We need to become really worried over our potential to galvanize growth again, across many of our economies. There is this growing feeling that in Europe, perhaps even the United States, we are in for a prolonged drawn out ‘slump’ with the possibilities of a Japanese-style lost decade.

Crash austerity programmes are compounding deeper economic problems and we need to find ways to create more demand, yet it does seem our current approaches are placing increasing constraints on solving this growth need. Of course, the public debt to GDP for many countries is alarming but if you can’t fix the problems with achieving growth, you just get further into debt.

It seems as the predicted ‘inflows’ continue to fall below the forecasted ones you are forced into borrowing more to even support the existing environment. This adds further struggles to hold onto some of the essential services we require to function and we seem to continue downwards in a collapsing spiral.

We are suffering from those evil twins, a lack of fresh investments and bold innovation, which are failing, by not doing the essential job of promoting growth, of leading demand, of creating the new wealth we desperately need.

The scale of our needs requires a different type of engagement, up and down our society; we need a new set of norms otherwise we will continue to witness some extremely painful adjustments across large parts of society.

Engagement means different things to different people

People buy meaning not product

August 3, 2010Posted inMolecules

A little while ago I was talking to the Marketing Director of one of the leading consumer goods companies here in Europe and we began talking around his question “where does design fit in innovation and consumer goods?”
I started this with posing the premise back “What do things really mean?”  For example we need to have a clear vision of what good food means to us. We need to seek out and define a new meaning through, perhaps, design. So the question then became “how do you give meaning to things?” We innovate by making sense of these things- “People don’t buy product they buy meaning”