For too long, innovation has been treated as an exclusive, top-down process. We build small, elite R&D teams, sequester them in innovation labs, and task them with generating the next breakthrough idea. While this model has produced many successes, it is fundamentally limited. It relies on the finite expertise of a select few and often suffers from groupthink, tunnel vision, and a detachment from the very customers it seeks to serve. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I am here to argue that the most powerful engine of creativity is not a closed-door meeting, but the wisdom of the crowd. The future of innovation belongs to those who are willing to democratize the process and harness the boundless creativity of a diverse, global collective.
Crowdsourcing is more than just a buzzword; it is a strategic shift in mindset. It is the practice of outsourcing a task or problem to a large, undefined group of people, whether they are employees, customers, or the general public. By opening up the innovation process, organizations can access a level of diversity in thought and experience that no internal team could ever replicate. It moves the focus from a single point of origin to a decentralized network of passion, insight, and fresh perspective. The problems that have stumped your experts may be solved in minutes by someone with a completely different background. The key is to stop asking “who can solve this?” and start asking, “who might have a good idea?”
The Foundational Pillars of Crowdsourced Innovation
Successful crowdsourcing is not a random act of faith; it is a carefully designed, human-centered process built on a few core pillars:
Openness and Access: The first step is to break down the walls. Create a clear, low-friction platform where anyone can submit an idea. The easier it is to participate, the more diverse and numerous the ideas will be.
Specificity and Challenge: The “crowd” needs a clear, compelling problem to solve. A vague request will yield vague results. Frame the challenge in a way that is inspiring and provides enough context for people to contribute meaningful solutions.
Meaningful Incentives: People are motivated by more than just money. While cash prizes can be effective for technical challenges, a sense of purpose, recognition, or the opportunity to see their idea come to life can be just as, if not more, powerful.
Transparency and a Feedback Loop: The crowd needs to feel heard. Be transparent about the process—how ideas are evaluated, why some are chosen, and what happens to the winning submissions. Closing the loop by celebrating the contributors, even those whose ideas weren’t chosen, builds trust and encourages future participation.
“The best ideas don’t come from the people you pay to think; they come from the people who can’t stop thinking.” — Braden Kelley
Case Study 1: Lego Ideas – From Fan Passion to Product Powerhouse
The Challenge:
For decades, Lego relied on an internal team of master builders and designers to create new sets. While this produced incredible products, the company faced a challenge: how to tap into the passionate and creative community of Lego fans who were building their own amazing creations at home. This was a classic case of an innovation process being limited by its own walls.
The Crowdsourcing Solution:
Lego launched Lego Ideas (originally Lego Cuusoo), a brilliant crowdsourcing platform that turned its most loyal fans into an R&D department. The process is simple: anyone can submit an idea for a new Lego set. If the idea garners 10,000 votes from the community, Lego’s internal team reviews it. If it is chosen for production, the creator receives a percentage of the sales and credit for the design. This model is a masterclass in human-centered innovation.
Incentivized Engagement: The promise of having their design sold globally and receiving a portion of the profits is a powerful incentive for creators.
Built-in Feedback: The voting process acts as a powerful market validation tool. Lego gets instant feedback on which ideas resonate most strongly with their core audience.
Community Building: The platform transformed passive consumers into active co-creators. It fostered a vibrant, global community of builders who felt a deep sense of ownership and pride in the brand.
The Result:
Lego Ideas has been a resounding success, leading to the creation of some of Lego’s most popular and iconic sets, including the *Minecraft* series and the *Back to the Future* DeLorean. The program proved that the best ideas were not always in the boardroom but were being built in the homes of their most dedicated fans. It leveraged passion, talent, and a sense of shared purpose to build an innovation engine that is both profitable and profoundly human.
Case Study 2: The Netflix Prize – A Technical Challenge for a Global Crowd
The Challenge:
In the mid-2000s, Netflix was a DVD-by-mail service. A key part of its business model was its movie recommendation engine, which was good, but not great. Improving its accuracy by just a small percentage could lead to millions of dollars in savings and increased customer satisfaction. This was a highly technical, data-driven problem that had stumped its internal team of brilliant engineers.
The Crowdsourcing Solution:
Netflix took a bold and unconventional approach. They launched the Netflix Prize, a global crowdsourcing competition with a prize of $1 million to the first team that could improve their recommendation algorithm’s accuracy by 10%. They provided a massive dataset (anonymized, of course) and a clear, measurable goal. The contest was a highly structured, incentive-based crowdsourcing effort that attracted academics, data scientists, and engineers from around the world.
A Clear, Measurable Goal: The 10% improvement target was specific and quantifiable, which made the challenge compelling to a technical audience.
High-Stakes Incentive: The $1 million prize was a significant reward that attracted some of the world’s best minds in a way that traditional recruitment could not.
Intellectual Freedom: Netflix provided the problem and the data, but no one was constrained by internal bureaucracy, politics, or assumptions. The crowd was free to experiment without limits.
The Result:
The contest was a wild success. Over 40,000 teams from 186 countries participated. After three years, a collaborative team of researchers finally met the 10% goal, with the winning algorithm being an ensemble of different methods. The Netflix Prize not only solved a critical business problem but also created a new industry standard for recommendation engines and demonstrated the power of open innovation. It proved that for highly complex problems, the right answer may not be in your office, but in the collective genius of the global crowd.
Conclusion: The Future of Innovation is Collaborative
The era of closed-door innovation is over. In a world defined by complexity and rapid change, the ability to crowdsource creativity is a non-negotiable strategic capability. It’s about more than just getting new ideas; it’s about building a more resilient, connected, and human-centered organization. By treating your customers, employees, and the global community not as passive audiences but as active collaborators, you can tap into a wellspring of creativity that is truly infinite.
As leaders, our role is to move beyond the traditional models and create the platforms, the incentives, and the cultural mindset that empowers everyone to contribute. The most profound innovations of the future will not be created by a single genius in a lab, but by the collective wisdom of a motivated crowd. It’s time to open our doors and invite the world to help us build a better future, together.
Extra Extra: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.
Image credit: Freepik
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
Recently I had the opportunity to interview Mauro Porcini, author of the new book The Human Side of Innovation: The Power of People in Love with People.
Mauro Porcini is PepsiCo’s first ever Chief Design Officer. He joined the food & beverage corporation in 2012 and in said role he is infusing design thinking into PepsiCo’s culture and is leading a new approach to innovation by design that impacts the company’s product platforms and brands, which include Pepsi, Lay’s, Mountain Dew, Gatorade, Sodastream, Doritos, Lifewtr, Bubly, Aquafina, Cheetos, Quaker, 7Up, Mirinda, amongst many others. His focus extends from physical to virtual expressions of the brands, including product, packaging, events, advertising, fashion and art collaborations, retail activation, architecture, and digital media.
The interview dives into multiple aspects of innovation and design, including risk management, incremental versus disruptive innovation, the importance of language, meaning, and more.
Without further ado, here is the video recording:
Thanks to you Mauro for sharing your insights with our global human-centered change and innovation community!
To learn more about Mauro’s views on the importance of our humanity to design and innovation, grab yourself a copy of his new book The Human Side of Innovation: The Power of People in Love with People.
If you are more of a reader, then WITH FAIR WARNING, below you will find the questions I asked Mauro and a RAW TRANSCRIPT pulled directly out of YouTube without punctuation, etc. for the brave of heart.
I’m sorry, but it’s the best I can do right now. Here is the RAW, UNPUNCTUATED TRANSCRIPT of our interview:
1. Why is there no innovation without risk?
First of all thanks for having me it’s a pleasure to be here with you today why there is no innovation with our risk because the moment you change the status quo the moment you take anything it could be a product a brand
And experience a service anything and you modify uh its nature you modify that thing to take you to another status by definition you don’t know exactly uh what is going to happen you cannot control all the variables even just the fact that by modifying uh the solution people will react to it in a variety of different ways there is a wonderful um author and philosopher from Italy that inspired me since I was a child his name
Is pirandel and he wrote a book that in Italian was called Uno nesuno centonida I do remember exactly how they translated the title in English is available in many different languages but literally it means one nobody one hundred thousand and it talks about how we are one person but then eventually we are seen by the people surrounding Us in so many
Different ways and so we are 100 000 different people for all the people looking at us and interacting with us and seeing something different in us and then it goes on saying well because of this you know if you’re not yourself anymore and you are all those hundreds of thousands of interpretation uh you become nobody now we don’t need to think about this third iteration and this idea of nobody but that inspired me since I was very young because this is true for
Us as people but this is true also for anything we do as designers innovators entrepreneurs brand leaders we create something but we have no idea how that something is going to be interpreted by the people out there how they’re gonna use it they could spin it in One Direction in the other direction and so by definition when we create something we need to try to understand as much as possible the people in front of us their needs their wants their dreams and then
We need to really Buffet we need to do a proposal Ernesto juice Monday the founder of the lighting company are telling me that is Iconic you know premium luxury lighting firm used to say I don’t create solutions for people I create proposals and we’ll see how they will go obviously you know I try to manage the risk of The Proposal I try to control all the variables but we need to understand that we are Innovative and we’re really innovating we are need to
Be ready to take risk and we need to manage the risk with all the tools that we can with data we research with our knowledge but at the end of the day we need to be ready to take the risk and we also need to be ready therefore to manage the risk I used to work in 3M and the famous iconic CEO of 3M for many many years William McKnight used to say that once again there is not Innovation with our risk he was saying essentially the same thing and therefore we need to
Manage risk in the culture of the common we need to be okay with missteps with mistakes with failures or as I like to call them with experiments we need to be ready to embed the idea of failure slash experiment in our financial algorithms and we need to make sure that if somebody make an experiment that doesn’t go in the right direction by the way an experiment that by definition is all about testing and ideas so in any direction it goes is probably the right
Direction but you understand what I’m talking about when somebody makes an experiment proceed eventually by people as a failure or a mistake we don’t crucify the person we actually celebrate eventually the learning coming out of the misstep and we need to put in place also and ecosystem our processes and tools to extract as much learning out of that misstep and share the learn with the rest of the organization
Yeah I think I think it’s very important that that last Point especially that you just made around learning is the the key thing that you’re trying to achieve with any experiment and you can learn uh from success and failure and you know most of the time we we focus on trying to eliminate risk but I think you’re right that it’s key to not only manage it but manage the acceptance of the risk so so building upon that
2. You say innovation should start from our personal lives, but we also frequently say in design thinking that ‘you are not the customer’. How do you reconcile the two?
I love this question and nobody asked me this question yet I love it for a reason in the American culture of design that is the cultural design that essentially took to fame the idea of this I think you know and celebrated the idea of the same thinking I think there is somehow
And misunderstanding about what design thinking really is because we’ve been celebrating so much the processes the tools the ways of working uh that we think that is enough to bring in a consultant do a workshop on this and thinking all of a sudden now everybody knows the methodology we can do design think we can solve the problems of the world with that we think that we can bring in a design leader in these organizations and somehow
Introduce the idea of the same thinking and once again we’ll solve everything and the reality is that design thinking is not just a tool it’s not just about the tool eventually if you want to identify the same thinking as a methodology it’s not just about that there is the design thinker behind that and so there is all this conversations about the fact that you need to somehow detach yourself from uh the product the brand experience you
Need to focus everything on your end user or your customer or your consumer on the people you serve I like to call them people human beings and and so a lot of people think that you need to remove the sensitivity of the design The Poetry of the design the ability of the designer to understand those insights to observe people and translate that into poetry
Translate that into something that is unique that is different you know you can observe a reality in a neutral way as much as you want but at the end of the day if you put 20 people observing the same reality in the same way these 20 people we create solutions that are 20 times different on the base of their sensitivity and this is great we need to say that we need to preserve that is so important to understand that the touch of the design
Interpretation of the designer you know how the designer translates something that is objective that is neutral that is read about understanding the people you have in front of you but then add color nuances poetry as I called it earlier to make it magic to make it unique and this is the reason why you cannot replace designers with artificial intelligence at least until artificial intelligence
Will be able to replace human beings but then you know replacing designers or innovators will be the last of the problems or Humanity because artificial intelligence will think that you don’t need Humanity at all because we are totally in efficient in this plan I think we are destroying you know our society and our planet but before we get there hopefully we will never get there this sensitivity of the person the human being is something
We want to save and we need to stop talking about design thinking and Innovation processes as processes that need to be just objective and neutral without realizing the importance of having human beings with their emotions and their interpretations in these processes this is so clear when you are in a startup when you are a star designer to design a chair or a piece of light they make the difference as the
Entrepreneur make the difference in a subtop and then we work in corporations we work a scale and we forget the importance of the human being with a unique approach and sensitivity that can transform a cold data an observation that is available to anybody out there in Magic The Magic that make your company grow the magic that add shoulder value to your stock the magic the set you apart from competition yeah very very great points I think that
Too often people get lost in the idea of design thinking as a process when it’s more about a mindset and like you said the magic that that comes from identifying that key human insight and then doing something interesting with it
3. Why is incremental innovation no longer enough?
Incremental Innovation is safer and is a stable way to keep your company going to keep it up to speed and to progress towards something bigger and
Better so we need that is not enough because we live in a world that is continuously disrupted by new things in the world of business that means that we have so many new companies new brands new products coming in in their business reality competing with our products and brands in our life it means that there are so many things changing all the time and we live in total uncertainty and therefore
The ability to change and to flex and eventually to these wraps is part of this new ecosystem we live in is becoming many situations for you know many people uh in many companies even a condition for survival you know if you’re a person you lose your job or you’re attacked by a virus or something happen imagine you’re like you need to be able to disrupt and and and and this is creating so much anxiety in this Society is so much an
Exciting in companies as well but let’s go back to you know the context of business in companies we live in a world where today anybody can come up with an idea get easy access to funding through their proliferation of investment funds and all platforms like kickstarter.com where you can crowdfund your idea the Custom Manufacturing is going down driven by globalization and new technologies you can go straight to the people you serve what I like to call
People and other person called consumers through the e-commerce platforms to sell them stuff and through social media to promote your ideas and products in all these areas the companies of the past were building their huge barriers to entry middle scale of production distribution and communication it was so difficult to go compete with a big brand with a big company for the man and the woman on the street today they can and so the big and the small are left with
Just one solution they need to focus on the needs and wants of people and create something extraordinary for them the way we are trying to do that at PepsiCo is to think of a future uh where you know understand what is the future understand the societal diffusion understand the freedom marriage category of the future and understand what kind of Road PepsiCo could play in in the future and then understand what kind of product portfolio we need
To have to be ready to the Future so already that thinking is somehow disruptive or generates idea that are disruptive then you need to figure out how to use them this kind of ideas inform our Innovation strategy in turn developing things in-house it informs our partnership and you venture strategy it informs our acquisition strategy so you need to find ways to be disruptive in a strategic way
To be ready to a war that is Shifting and changing in the speed of light and the normal cycle of innovation based on incremental linear innovation don’t work as well as they used to work because of the speed of change it doesn’t mean you need to develop everything from within it means that you need to develop an innovation strategy that then can find different kind of outputs you can do everything by
Yourself you can do it with Partners out there or you can eventually make Acquisitions as well if you are a company I can afford it and this is by the way interesting because in the startup kind of world we live in the acquisition strategy is what many of these are Tabs are looking for so it’s a health ecosystem where you have entrepreneurs eventually build up new things new ideas and you have corporations at a certain point are
Alive and work with them so is is a very interesting new scenario but both the beginners model need to understand how to combine incremental Innovation with more disruptive innovation and thinking definitely definitely and that that’s uh that’s a very important point that without companies seeking to acquire startups then fewer startups would it would exist because they wouldn’t see that as an exit um very cool so uh let’s go back to
Something that you spoke about there just recently there which is …
4. What is the harm in calling people consumers?
Look I studied design in school we would never call the people we designed for consumers it would be so weird and we’re calling them eventually users most of the time people human being we were talking already back then 30 years ago about human centricity but not as a nobody thing it was just the way we were doing things and so if you
Call People’s consumers you’re gonna face that you’re gonna focus on the idea of selling them stuff obviously I mean you look at them as entity buying your product and you want to make money on by the way on top of it you’re gonna categorize people and reduce people to the area of consuming but you know what me you my wife my daughter my friends we do so much more in life than just consuming you know we do so many more things and I
Don’t want companies and Brands to look at me as a consuming being I want to have companies and Brands looking at me as a human being for who I am if you call them users at least you’re gonna focus on the use of the product you’re offering them and so you’re gonna try to satisfy the needs that they have and create products that are functionally relevant and desirable but if you look at them as people as
Human beings you’re gonna go above and beyond you’re going to think about them holistically you’re gonna think about them as people you care about people you love you know the subtitle of the book is people in love with people and when you love somebody could be your kids your wife your husband your significant other your parents and your friends what do you do well you try to do more you try to really make these people happy to do
Magic and expect that you want to make sure that you are serving them at 360 degrees and this is you know the mindset and the culture you build in your company if you stop calling them consumers or even users I used to have to call them for who they are people human beings it changed completely words are powerful and and a word can help you shaping the culture of an organization call them people and you will have armies of other people in love with
People trying to create something extraordinary for them is the product is the brand is the service you’re not going to be happy just with something that is good enough because it’s profitable and people are buying it you’re gonna try always to create something that is extraordinary because you want first of all to make people happy now this was a luxury in the past eventually for companies today is a need and is a must because of the
Competitive landscape we live in with barriers to entry crumbling down under the Winds of globalization new technologies and digital media and therefore the need of this company is already creating something extraordinary in all the different dimensions because if you have one of few areas or weakness that in the past you could protect your barriers to entry today are exactly the entry point for your competitors to come and erode your market share your mind
Share your love share with your with the people you serve well I think I think those are all uh very important points that you have to bring it away from the ACT to consumption and back to the the whole person if you really want to connect with the people that you’re looking to to serve and to bring value and meaning to uh speaking of meaning what does it take my dog that is crying usually stays on the desk with me one of the two and now it’s not but it cannot come out by itself
5. What does it take to make a design meaningful?
Every time we create a product um or any solution in general somehow we are touching the life of these people in a variety of different
Ways and we can add um convenience safety Beauty style and a variety of other values to the life of these people or on the opposite direction we can make the life of these people and I’m we can create complications to their lives we can make it challenging and difficult therefore when we create something we should always be driven by this idea of creating something that is relevant to them
And relevant to the company you know I I and and so I Define this relevance through a series of principles of meaningful design that I talk about in the book there are two foundational principles that are one the idea of creating something that is functional that is emotional and is semiotic so it fulfilled a specific functional need it creates uh engagement and emotional level between you and the product in the
Quran and then somehow it represents you as a semiotic value it tells a story about you to the rest of the world and then the other foundational principle is that the the solution should be essentially and I synthetizing in a way you know but new unique different uh from anything out there then there are a series of other principles that somehow take you the level down and give you a direction on how to design these products the product should be
Sustainable from aesthetic standpoint from a functional standpoint from an equal ecological standpoint from a social standpoint respectful of people um from a emotional stem points from a financial statement there are a series of um values and I call it sustainable meaning that you need to think about your portfolio of products and Solutions in time it needs to be it needs to add all these different layers of value over
Time uh it’s not just about fulfilling a solution I need in the short term but really thinking about how the solution is sustainable over time and now you need to be ready to change over time to create something extraordinary for them Then There are a series of other clarifying principles but I invite you to have a look at the book it will be a longer story but he told you know those principles are really about the sensitivity of the designer and some of
The things we discussed earlier in this conversation uh about the fact that design is not just about the cold solution to a problem to a product but it’s a story that is the sensitivity of of uh the the the designer or the entrepreneur or anybody coming up with a lady and creating the solution behind that very good that that story is definitely challenging to create I’m sure
6. Why do we work so hard as human beings to get the right answers to the wrong questions? How can we do better?
Well often we live our lives personal lives as well as our professional lives answering to expectations that come from order and so here you are and they tell you
Well you need to do this and to do that you need to you know have certain steps in your life and you’re like okay this is what they’re asking me to do I comply I go to high school I go to university I get married eventually I do certain things that Society expect me to do you go to a job and they tell you this is your job description I hire you because of this and then later on they tell you well this is your project this is the brief
And what most of the people do is answering the brief working within the boundaries of the job description living within the boundaries of those expectations of society there are some people though and usually this is the mindset of the innovator the challenge the convention the challenge the question the challenge the brief not for the sake of challenging but just because they want to understand better they want to understand if what
They ask to do is the right thing to do for them but also for the people asking the people being your boss the company or even Society do we live in the right Society should we challenge the conventions of this Society is my job description great for my company or I could do more than that to really help the company in ways that the company doesn’t even realize is the question in the brief the right one
Or actually they should ask me something else because if I just answer the question I’m gonna generate a series of answers that are great that are right but the question is wrong and therefore by definition also those right answers will be wrong won’t have value as an example is an example I make in the book as well imagine they ask you to design a bridge and many people would be like okay they asked me to design a bridge so I’m going
To design a bridge and I’m going to design a bridge to these beautiful that is functionally unbelievable and and I I’m gonna generate you know a series of bridges and they will be incredible designers and Engineers that we generate beautiful and super functional bridges that we all admire and they’re very iconic but the real innovator and by the way the philosopher the child will ask why
Here I am with another dog just a second she’s well uh the real innovator as well as the philosopher and a child they all ask why is typical of the philosopher to ask why and then again why again why is a technique to arrive to their root cause to the primary cause of everything the children do the same for other reasons and so once when you start to apply you will figure out in the case of the bridge that first of all
Yes you need to move from A to B why do I need a bridge of course you need to move from one side of the river to the other side of the river but then you ask again why why do I need to move on the other side of the river and they will tell you what because in the other side of the river there is the hospital and therefore the people of this town they need to take a bridge to arrive in a convenient way to the hospital if you stop there
Immediately you will think well maybe the bridge is the solution but maybe I can invent something else maybe I’m going to invent a sort of drone that you can write that can make each person real time super quick much faster than taking a car and going on a bridge arriving to the other side of the river so already that is an innovation instead of Designing a bridge you’re designing a machine that can fly it can take you to the hospital
But if you keep asking why maybe you arrive to realize that actually you don’t need the hospital on the other side you know the hospital is there but you can build an Hospital on this side of the river and so instead of Designing yet another Bridge you’re gonna design an hospital that is by far better Solutions because these people can have right much faster to the hospital when they did it than taking a bridge and going to the other side of the river
This is a very banal example very simplistic example to show how often we keep creating solutions for problems that are not the right ones to solve and if we will question the challenge the brief who arrive to something very different I did this all my life because of a man that with these behaviors and the way he was conducting business somehow taught me the kind of mindset it was my partner in the agency I created many years ago his name is Claudio a
Famous shoe business producer imagine like meeting Jay-Z here in the United States when you’re 24 and creating a company with this person so that’s what happened to me and I learned by observing him how he would challenge everything and every time thinking how can I do something different from uh what I did you know even himself before or from what everybody else did before and he was using this technique of always trying to understand the root
Causes and how you could really create something relevant for people in a different way and so with that kind of mindset I joined 3M I joined PepsiCo and I started with challenging my own job description creating something different in the way I was interpreting my job they were asking me to design products mostly the aesthetic side of a product a 3M I created the chief design officer position over time doing much more than what they were asking me and I thought
I’d be in so much more value for the company than if I was just designing the style of those two products they asked me to design when I was 27.
Image credits: Pixabay, Mauro Porcini
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
In the world of product development, we’ve long been obsessed with the quantifiable. We meticulously list features, measure performance in milliseconds, and define success by technical specifications. We design for functionality, believing that the most powerful product is simply the one that does its job most efficiently. But as a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I’ve seen a profound shift. The most enduring, beloved, and successful products of our time are not defined by their features, but by the feelings they evoke. The future of innovation belongs to those who move beyond cold logic and embrace the emotional core of great design.
The human brain is wired to make decisions based on emotion, and then use logic to justify those decisions. This isn’t a flaw; it’s a fundamental part of our experience. A product that elicits joy, trust, surprise, or a sense of belonging forges a bond that is far more powerful and resilient than one built on a simple list of features. When a user feels a connection to a product, they don’t just use it; they become an advocate for it. They forgive its flaws, celebrate its improvements, and build a lasting relationship with the brand. This is the difference between building a useful tool and creating an unforgettable experience.
The Three Principles of Emotional Design
Emotional design isn’t about slapping a beautiful user interface on a clunky product. It’s a holistic, human-centered practice that requires empathy, intuition, and a willingness to focus on the full user journey. Here are three core principles:
Empathy Over Efficiency: Before you can design for a feeling, you must understand the human being who will experience it. This means going beyond demographics and data points to conduct deep, qualitative research. What are their frustrations? What are their aspirations? What moments in their day could be made a little bit better, a little more joyful?
Designing for the Experience, Not Just the Interaction: A single user interaction might be efficient, but what about the entire journey? Emotional design looks at the whole picture—from the moment a customer discovers your brand to the final, post-purchase experience. Every touchpoint is an opportunity to reinforce a feeling of trust, delight, or ease.
The Power of the Unexpected: Great emotional design often surprises us. It’s the small, thoughtful detail that goes above and beyond—the clever animation, the personalized message, or the intuitive solution to a problem we didn’t even know we had. These micro-moments of delight are what turn a user into a true fan.
“Features can be copied. Feelings can’t. The ultimate competitive advantage is an emotional connection that is deeply human and utterly unique.” — Braden Kelley
Case Study 1: Apple and the Feeling of Intuitive Magic
The Challenge:
In the early 2000s, the consumer electronics market was dominated by clunky, feature-heavy devices. MP3 players, for example, were often difficult to navigate, with tiny screens and an overwhelming number of buttons. While functionally they played music, the user experience was often frustrating and technical. The “features race” led to complex, unapproachable products.
The Emotional Design Solution:
Apple’s innovation was not just in creating a better MP3 player; it was in designing for a feeling of simplicity and effortless magic. The original iPod’s design was a masterclass in emotional design. It had a single scroll wheel, a clean, minimal interface, and a seamless connection to iTunes. The famous iPod unboxing experience—from the perfectly weighted box to the clean aesthetic—was designed to evoke a feeling of elegance and anticipation. With the iPhone, Apple went even further. The absence of a keyboard and the simple, finger-driven interface made the technology feel intuitive and magical. The user wasn’t just using a phone; they were interacting with a fluid, responsive piece of art.
Empathy: Apple deeply understood the frustration of the current user experience—the clunkiness, the technical complexity—and designed a solution that felt effortless.
Experience over Function: The iPod and iPhone weren’t just about playing music or making calls. They were about the entire user experience, from the unboxing to the seamless integration of hardware and software.
The Unexpected: The tactile satisfaction of the iPod’s scroll wheel and the fluid, responsive gestures of the iPhone were small, delightful moments that built a deep emotional bond.
The Result:
Apple didn’t win the features race; they won the feelings race. The emotional connection they forged with their customers built an unparalleled brand loyalty that allowed them to command a premium price and dominate the market. Their success proves that a focus on human feeling can be a more powerful strategic choice than a focus on technical specifications alone.
Case Study 2: Airbnb and the Feeling of Trust and Belonging
The Challenge:
When Airbnb launched, the concept of staying in a stranger’s home was met with deep-seated fear and skepticism. The fundamental business model was built on trust, a feeling that is incredibly difficult to design for and instill in users. People needed to feel safe enough to book a space and welcome a stranger into their home, a challenge that went far beyond typical e-commerce design.
The Emotional Design Solution:
Airbnb’s design team understood that their product was not just a booking platform; it was a trust engine. They went to great lengths to design for feelings of security and belonging. This started with their user profiles, which were not just functional but also told a story. They encouraged users to build detailed, personal profiles with photos and bios, making strangers feel more human and less intimidating. The robust review system, with its two-way feedback loop, was designed to build a feeling of social proof and accountability. The company’s brand messaging, with its focus on “belonging anywhere,” was a powerful emotional narrative that resonated with people’s desire for connection and community.
Empathy: Airbnb designers deeply understood the core fears of their users—the fear of the unknown, the fear of danger, and the fear of a bad experience—and they systematically designed features to alleviate those fears.
Experience over Function: The design wasn’t just about booking a transaction. It was about creating an entire experience of belonging, from the user interface to the real-world interactions.
The Unexpected: Small touches, like the personalized messages from hosts and the unique, curated experiences, created a feeling of connection that was far superior to a sterile hotel booking.
The Result:
By designing for the emotional core of trust and belonging, Airbnb overcame the biggest obstacle to its business model. They transformed a scary concept into a global phenomenon. Their success is a powerful testament to the idea that the most challenging human emotions—like fear and skepticism—can be deconstructed and overcome with a thoughtful, human-centered approach to design.
Conclusion: The Ultimate Differentiator
In a world where technology is a commodity and features are easily replicated, the ultimate and most sustainable competitive advantage is an emotional connection. The brands that will win in the future are not those that build the best tools, but those that design the most powerful feelings. As leaders and innovators, our challenge is to stop seeing design as a final coat of paint and start seeing it as a fundamental strategic lever. We must prioritize empathy, listen to the unarticulated desires of our customers, and have the courage to design for a more human, more emotional, and more meaningful experience. The path to great innovation leads from the spreadsheet to the human heart, and it is a journey worth taking.
Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.
Image credit: Unsplash
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?
But enough delay, here are October’s ten most popular innovation posts:
If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!
Have something to contribute?
Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.
P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last two years:
In the Before Times, we attended conferences to learn, make connections, and promote ourselves and our businesses. Then COVID hit, and conferences became virtual. Although that made them easier to attend, it also made them easier to skip. Because, if we’re honest, most conferences were more about connecting and promoting than learning.
Last week, I went to one of those rare, almost mythical, conferences more focused on learning and connecting than promoting. It was fantastic! It was also in Nebraska (which is a pretty interesting place, btw).
It’s a bit embarrassing to admit, but if you asked me to define “Strategy,” I’d respond with a long and rambling answer. Which means I can’t define “strategy.” This admission is especially embarrassing because I have a resume littered with places where I developed, drafted, and implemented strategies, so I should have learned what the word means. But nope, I didn’t.
I suspect I’m not alone.
Asking for the definition of strategy is like asking if you must wear clothes to the office. You should know the answer. But unlike whether or not clothing is mandatory, most of us don’t know the answer, AND it’s easy to get away with never knowing the answer.
The elegant simplicity of Kareen’s definition of strategy blew my mind. It’s short, memorable, and something that most people can understand. Maybe I should share the definition with my alma maters and past employers.
“When we feel threatened, our IQ drops 50 to 70 points”
When I first heard talk about Psychological Safety and Safe Spaces in today’s business world, I rolled my eyes. Hard. As a Gen X-er, I grumbled about how we didn’t need “safe spaces” when I grew up because we were tough and self-reliant, and I lamented the inevitable downfall of society caused by weak and coddled Millennials.
I was wrong.
Psychological Safety is absolutely and unquestionably essential for individuals to grow, teams to work, companies to operate and innovate, and societies to function and evolve. I’ve seen teams and businesses transform and achieve unbelievable success by discussing and living the elements they require for Psychological Safety. I’ve also seen teams and businesses fail in its absence.
These results aren’t surprising when you realize that you feel threatened when you are in a complex situation in which you cannot accurately predict the outcomes. And when you feel threatened, you are half as intelligent, effective, and creative as you are when you’re calm.
So, if you’re a manager and you’re upset that your people aren’t as intelligent, effective, or creative as they should be, it may not be their fault. It may be yours.
“Stage expertise, not industry expertise, is key to innovation success”
There is deep comfort in the known. It’s why we gravitate to people like us. It’s also why companies ask job candidates and consultants about their experience in the industry and choose those with deep experience and impressive expertise. Often, there’s nothing with this question or the resulting decision.
Sometimes, it’s precisely the wrong question.
Sometimes, functional expertise is significantly more important than industry experience. After all, if you’re the hiring manager at a healthcare company looking for a Director of Finance, who would you hire – a Marketing Director from a competitor or a Finance Director from a CPG company?
That’s the case with innovation.
Decades of real-world experience (not to mention the successful launch of 100+ startups) show that successful corporate startup teams had expertise (mindsets, skillsets, executional drive) in the startup’s phase and a working knowledge of the industry rather extensive industry expertise and little to no innovation experience.
Questions are good. The right questions are better. So, the next time you’re staffing up an innovation team (or hiring a consultant), choose based on their innovation experience and willingness to learn about your industry.
Innovation happens everywhere
That’s why people from San Francisco, Austin, Washington DC, NYC, Toronto, Boston, and dozens of other places converged on Lincoln, Nebraska.
We went to see innovation in action and learn about the thriving startup community in the middle of the country. We also went to learn and connect with others committed to creating new things that create value.
Getting our minds blown was a bonus.
Image credit: Pixabay
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
In the relentless war for talent, organizations often compete on a transactional level: salary, benefits, and perks. While these are certainly important, they are no longer the decisive factors for top-tier professionals, especially for the younger generations entering the workforce. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I am here to argue that the most powerful, sustainable, and effective talent magnet is not compensation, but **purpose**. In a world where meaning and impact are highly valued, a clear and authentic purpose is what separates a good company from a great one. It’s what moves an organization from a place where people simply work to a place where people are compelled to belong.
The modern workforce, particularly top talent, is looking for more than a paycheck. They seek alignment between their personal values and the mission of their employer. They want to know that their work contributes to something bigger than a profit margin. They are driven by a desire to solve meaningful problems and make a tangible difference in the world. When an organization can clearly articulate its purpose—its “why”—it creates a compelling narrative that resonates with the hearts and minds of potential employees. This isn’t about crafting a slick marketing campaign; it’s about embedding purpose into the very DNA of the company, from its core strategy to its daily operations. The result is a self-selecting talent pool of motivated, innovative, and deeply committed individuals.
The Four Pillars of Purpose-Driven Talent Attraction
Building an organization that attracts talent through purpose requires a commitment to four key pillars:
Authenticity and Integrity: Purpose must be genuine, not a performative facade. It must be reflected in the company’s actions, its products, and its leadership decisions. Hypocrisy is a powerful repellent for today’s talent.
Clear Communication: The “why” must be simple, inspiring, and consistently communicated to both internal and external audiences. It should be a constant theme in recruitment, onboarding, and internal communications.
Mission Alignment: Every role, from the factory floor to the executive suite, must be connected to the company’s purpose. Employees need to see how their specific contributions advance the larger mission, creating a sense of ownership and meaning.
Tangible Impact: Purpose must translate into tangible, measurable impact. Whether it’s a social, environmental, or technological impact, showing concrete results of the company’s purpose makes the mission feel real and achievable.
“You can rent a person’s hands with a salary, but you can only earn their heart with a purpose. And in the innovation economy, hearts are the most valuable asset.”
Case Study 1: Microsoft’s Transformation from “Know-It-Alls” to “Learn-It-Alls”
The Challenge:
In the early 2010s, Microsoft was a technology giant struggling with a stagnant culture. Employees were highly competitive, often working in silos, and the company was seen as a “know-it-all” culture. This environment made it difficult to attract top talent who were looking for collaborative, growth-oriented workplaces. CEO Satya Nadella’s vision for a new Microsoft was centered on a new purpose: **to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more**. 🚀
The Purpose-Driven Solution:
Nadella didn’t just write a new mission statement; he fundamentally shifted the company’s culture. He focused on a **growth mindset**, encouraging employees to become “learn-it-alls.” This new purpose created a compelling narrative for potential hires, who were no longer just joining a software company but a mission-driven organization. Microsoft’s purpose became a powerful filter for talent, attracting individuals who were passionate about making a global impact through technology.
Talent Attraction: The new purpose helped Microsoft attract a new generation of engineers, designers, and leaders who were drawn to the company’s commitment to social and technological empowerment. This included talent from outside the traditional tech space, as the company’s mission resonated with a broader group of people.
Talent Retention: The growth mindset and a sense of shared purpose significantly increased employee engagement and retention. By linking individual roles to a global mission, employees felt a deeper sense of value and belonging, reducing the high turnover that had plagued the company in the past.
Innovation: The cultural shift led to a surge in innovation, as employees were encouraged to collaborate and experiment without fear of failure. Products like Microsoft Teams, which became a cornerstone of remote work, were born from this more open and purpose-driven environment.
The Result:
By shifting its core purpose and culture, Microsoft successfully revitalized its talent pipeline. It became a magnet for top talent, proving that a compelling mission can be a more powerful draw than just a high salary. The company’s market value soared, demonstrating that purpose and profit are not mutually exclusive but can, in fact, be mutually reinforcing.
Case Study 2: Warby Parker’s Vision for a Socially Conscious Business
The Challenge:
When Warby Parker launched in 2010, the eyewear market was dominated by a few large corporations, and a single pair of glasses was often prohibitively expensive. Co-founders Neil Blumenthal and David Gilboa’s purpose was to create a company that was both a successful business and a force for good. Their purpose-driven mission was simple: **to offer designer eyewear at a revolutionary price while leading the way for socially conscious businesses**. 👓
The Purpose-Driven Solution:
Warby Parker’s “Buy a Pair, Give a Pair” program was not just a marketing tactic; it was the core of their business model. For every pair of glasses sold, a pair was distributed to someone in need. This clear and compelling purpose became an instant talent magnet.
Talent Attraction: Warby Parker attracted talent who were passionate about making a difference. The company’s mission resonated with professionals who wanted to use their skills in retail, design, and technology to address a global health issue. They received a flood of applications from individuals who saw their work as a means to a greater end.
Culture of Purpose: This purpose permeated every aspect of the company’s culture. Employees were regularly involved in “giving trips” where they could see the direct impact of their work. This connection strengthened their commitment to the brand and its mission, creating a powerful sense of community.
Brand Loyalty: The purpose-driven model not only attracted top talent but also built an incredibly loyal customer base. This loyalty, in turn, reinforced the company’s mission and its value proposition to employees, creating a virtuous cycle of purpose, talent, and business success.
The Result:
Warby Parker successfully built a highly engaged and motivated workforce that was passionate about the company’s mission. Their purpose became a critical part of their recruitment strategy, attracting a wave of socially conscious professionals who were eager to contribute to a brand that aligned with their values. It proved that a clear purpose can attract, motivate, and retain top talent in a way that traditional incentives cannot.
Conclusion: Purpose is Not an HR Initiative, It’s a Strategic Imperative
In the new talent economy, purpose is no longer a “nice-to-have” or an HR initiative; it is a fundamental strategic imperative. The best talent is looking for more than a job; they are looking for a cause. They want to be part of an organization that is making a positive impact on the world, a brand they can be proud to work for and contribute to.
As leaders, our challenge is to move beyond the superficial and to truly embed purpose into the heart of our organizations. We must be authentic in our mission, transparent in our actions, and committed to showing the tangible impact of our work. By doing so, we will not only attract the most talented and innovative people but also build a more resilient, successful, and human-centered business. Your purpose isn’t just your north star for strategy; it’s your most powerful talent magnet.
Extra Extra: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.
Image credit: 1 of 950+ FREE quote slides available at http://misterinnovation.com
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
Within hours of planes crashing into the World Trade Center on 9-11, stories began circulating that it was not, in fact, the planes that caused the towers to collapse, but explosives planted inside by someone with access. Since then, a number of conspiracy theories have circulated that people ranging from government employees to Wall Street Traders were responsible for the attack.
So, it shouldn’t be surprising that there is no shortage of alleged schemes about the coronavirus epidemic, from theories that the disease is caused by 5G mobile networks to that Bill Gates cooked it up as part of a global plot to electronically track us through vaccinations. Even the president’s son has a pet theory.
The simple truth is that when a tragic event happens, we lose our sense of control and there will never be a shortage of hucksters willing to take advantage of that, for profit or for other reasons. Often, these are elaborate narratives and can seem very convincing. Yet the schemes tend to have common characteristics which we can use to spot and nullify their effect.
Questionable Credentials
The first and most obvious thing most fraudulent conspiracy theories have in common is questionable credentials. Credentials, like a professional degree or certification, are important because they show that someone’s expertise has been recognized by other experts in a specific field of endeavor and that person has subjected themselves to evaluation.
That doesn’t mean someone has to have a piece of paper for their ideas to matter. In fact, as Thomas Kuhn pointed out decades ago, it is often outsiders, like Richard Feynman in virology and Elon Musk in space exploration, who drive paradigm shifts in a particular domain. However, in those cases, the outsiders are almost always working in conjunction with recognized experts.
Of course, the hucksters understand the importance of credentials, so they use several ploys to confuse us. They often appear in videos in white lab coats and use scientific sounding words. Like a cargo cult, they adopt the appearance and forms of a scientific method but discard the substance. Often, they will point to the lack of acceptance by “the establishment” as proof that their ideas are so important, they are being silenced.
So, the first thing we should look at is the credentials of the person or people making the claim. Lacking credentials doesn’t immediately make you wrong and having them doesn’t necessarily make you right. Nevertheless, when someone is unwilling to accept some type of training and evaluation it should put us on our guard.
A Lack of Transparency
Real science is transparent. There are no trade secrets. You are providing information on your materials and methods as well as the data that results. The idea is that you want to give everybody all of the information they would need to question your conclusions and judge the value of what you profess to be contributing.
Conspiracy theorists don’t do this. That’s why YouTube is a favorite medium. It’s so hard to fact check. You aren’t expected to provide links or data in an appendix to a video. You can just make assertions set to dramatic music. You can flash images that suggest nefarious activities without making any real assertions.
Another favorite ploy of the hucksters is to point to the lack of data as proof of the importance of their ideas. Of course, they don’t have data! That’s part of the cover up! So, they refuse to give any real proof and try to bury you in false assertions. They shift the burden of proof to anybody who questions them. Can anybody prove the data doesn’t exist?
We want to constantly ask ourselves, “Is this person giving me all the information I would need to come to a different conclusion? Is he or she open to different interpretations of the same data?”
A Persecution Complex
While researching my book, Mapping Innovation, I interviewed dozens of top innovators. Some were world class scientists and engineers. Others were high level executives at large corporations. Still others were highly successful entrepreneurs. Overall, it was a pretty intimidating group.
So, I was surprised to find that, with few exceptions, they were some of the kindest and most generous people I have ever met. The behavior was so consistent that I felt that it couldn’t be an accident. So, I began to research the matter further and found that, to a surprising extent, generosity can be a competitive advantage.
One particular case that comes to mind is Jim Allison, who had his idea for curing cancer rejected by the establishment. The pain was apparent in his voice even 20 years after the fact. Yet he didn’t blame anybody. He tried to understand why people were skeptical, went back and further validated his data, pounded the pavement and kept advocating for his idea. Jim won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2018.
Conspiracy theorists, on the other hand, often go to great lengths to explain how they have been silenced by the establishment and say this is proof of the importance of their ideas. They ascribe malevolent motives to those who disagree with them. For them, there is no such thing as honest dissent.
Have You Ever Seen a Humble Conspiracy Theorist?
One thing that always impressed me about the innovators I researched was how they insisted on giving credit to others. This came through especially during fact checks, when they would insist, I note the contributions of their collaborators. They never claim that they did it all themselves.
The people who make the biggest breakthroughs aren’t necessarily smarter or harder working than anybody else. However, they are effective knowledge brokers who build up strong networks of collaborators. They don’t always know more, but they know who knows more and that helps them to access that random piece of knowledge or insight that allows them to crack a really tough problem.
Yet conspiracy theorists would have us believe that they possess, by either innate ability or opportunity, some unique insight that others are not privy to. They don’t invite collaboration, scrutiny or alternate perspectives because they believe they are already possessing the absolute truth.
We need to have a healthy skepticism, especially with ideas we would tend to agree with. We should ask questions, explore alternative explanations of the same data and be open to additional evidence. What we need to look out for are people who would suggest that we shouldn’t do these things, because they are the ones looking to deceive us.
Predicting Trends and Uncovering New Opportunities
GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato
In a world of accelerating change, the ability to see around corners is no longer a luxury; it’s a strategic imperative. For decades, organizations have relied on traditional market research, analyst reports, and expert intuition to predict the future. While these methods provide a solid view of the present and the immediate horizon, they often struggle to detect the faint, yet potent, signals of a more distant future. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I believe that **Artificial Intelligence is the most powerful new tool for foresight**. AI is not here to replace human intuition, but to act as a powerful extension of it, allowing us to process vast amounts of data and uncover patterns that are invisible to the human eye. The future of innovation isn’t about predicting what’s next; it’s about systematically sensing and shaping what’s possible. AI is the engine that makes this possible.
The human brain is a marvel of pattern recognition, but it is limited by its own biases, a finite amount of processing power, and the sheer volume of information available today. AI, however, thrives in this chaos. It can ingest and analyze billions of data points—from consumer sentiment on social media, to patent filings, to macroeconomic indicators—in a fraction of the time. It can identify subtle correlations and weak signals that, when combined, point to a major market shift years before it becomes a mainstream trend. By leveraging AI for foresight, we can move from a reactive position to a proactive one, turning our organizations from followers into first-movers.
The AI Foresight Blueprint
Leveraging AI for foresight isn’t a one-and-done task; it’s a continuous, dynamic process. Here’s a blueprint for how organizations can implement it:
Data-Driven Horizon Scanning: Use AI to continuously monitor a wide range of data sources, from academic papers and startup funding rounds to online forums and cultural movements. An AI can flag anomalies and emerging clusters of activity that fall outside of your industry’s current focus.
Pattern Recognition & Trend Identification: AI models can connect seemingly unrelated data points to identify nascent trends. For example, an AI might link a rise in plant-based food searches to an increase in sustainable packaging patents and a surge in home gardening interest, pointing to a larger “Conscious Consumer” trend.
Scenario Generation: Once a trend is identified, an AI can help generate multiple future scenarios. By varying key variables—e.g., “What if the trend accelerates rapidly?” or “What if a major competitor enters the market?”—an AI can help teams visualize and prepare for a range of possible futures.
Opportunity Mapping: AI can go beyond trend prediction to identify specific market opportunities. It can analyze the intersection of an emerging trend with a known customer pain point, generating a list of potential product or service concepts that address an unmet need.
“AI for foresight isn’t about getting a crystal ball; it’s about building a powerful telescope to see what’s on the horizon and a microscope to see what’s hidden in the data.”
Case Study 1: Stitch Fix – Algorithmic Personal Styling
The Challenge:
In the crowded and highly subjective world of fashion retail, predicting what a single customer will want to wear—let alone an entire market segment—is a monumental challenge. Traditional methods relied on seasonal buying patterns and the intuition of human stylists. This often led to excess inventory and a high rate of returns.
The AI-Powered Foresight Response:
Stitch Fix, the online personal styling service, built its entire business model on AI-powered foresight. The company’s core innovation was not in fashion, but in its algorithm. The AI ingests data from every single customer interaction—what they kept, what they returned, their style feedback, and even their Pinterest boards. This data is then cross-referenced with a vast inventory and emerging fashion trends. The AI can then:
Predict Individual Preference: The algorithm learns each customer’s taste over time, predicting with high accuracy which items they will like. This is a form of micro-foresight.
Uncover Macro-Trends: By analyzing thousands of data points across its customer base, the AI can detect emerging fashion trends long before they hit the mainstream. For example, it might notice a subtle shift in the popularity of a certain color, fabric, or cut among its early adopters.
The Result:
Stitch Fix’s AI-driven foresight has allowed them to operate with a level of efficiency and personalization that is nearly impossible for traditional retailers to replicate. By predicting consumer demand, they can optimize their inventory, reduce waste, and provide a highly-tailored customer experience. The AI doesn’t just help them sell clothes; it gives them a real-time, data-backed view of future consumer behavior, making them a leader in a fast-moving and unpredictable industry.
Case Study 2: Netflix – The Algorithm That Sees the Future of Entertainment
The Challenge:
In the early days of streaming, content production was a highly risky and expensive gamble. Studios would greenlight shows based on the intuition of executives, focus group data, and the past success of a director or actor. This process was slow and often led to costly failures.
The AI-Powered Foresight Response:
Netflix, a pioneer of AI-powered foresight, revolutionized this model. They used their massive trove of user data—what people watched, when they watched it, what they re-watched, and what they skipped—to predict not just what their customers wanted to watch, but what kind of content would be successful to produce. When they decided to create their first original series, House of Cards, they didn’t do so on a hunch. Their AI analyzed that a significant segment of their audience had a high affinity for the original British series, enjoyed films starring Kevin Spacey, and had a preference for political thrillers directed by David Fincher. The AI identified the convergence of these three seemingly unrelated data points as a major opportunity.
Predictive Content Creation: The algorithm predicted that a show with these specific attributes would have a high probability of success, a hypothesis that was proven correct.
Cross-Genre Insight: The AI’s ability to see patterns across genres and user demographics allowed Netflix to move beyond traditional content silos and identify new, commercially viable niches.
The Result:
Netflix’s success with House of Cards was a watershed moment that proved the power of AI-powered foresight. By using data to inform its creative decisions, Netflix was able to move from a content distributor to a powerful content creator. The company now uses AI to inform everything from production budgets to marketing campaigns, transforming the entire entertainment industry and proving that a data-driven approach to creativity is not only possible but incredibly profitable. Their foresight wasn’t a lucky guess; it was a systematic, AI-powered process.
Conclusion: The Augmented Innovator
The era of “gut-feel” innovation is drawing to a close. The most successful organizations of the future will be those that have embraced a new model of augmented foresight, where human intuition and AI’s analytical power work in harmony. AI can provide the objective, data-backed foundation for our predictions, but it is up to us, as human leaders, to provide the empathy, creativity, and ethical judgment to turn those predictions into a better future.
AI is not here to tell you what to do; it’s here to show you what’s possible. Our role is to ask the right questions, to lead with a strong sense of purpose, and to have the courage to act on the opportunities that AI uncovers. By training our teams to listen to the whispers in the data and to trust in this new collaborative process, we can move from simply reacting to the future to actively creating it, one powerful insight at a time.
Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.
Image credit: Microsoft CoPilot
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
The surprising innovation stories behind that sunny afternoon delight
GUEST POST from John Bessant
Season of mists, mellow fruitfulness — and those rare but wonderful days when the sun smiles down benignly. Strolling in the park, absorbing the warmth my attention was taken by an ice cream.
Or rather, to the face of a toddler who was very happily getting himself around an eminently lickable cone, with the usual results. We probably don’t really have to worry too much about the dietary impact of ice cream in situations like these because 80% of the foodstuff was being liberally spread around his face, across his clothes or dripping sadly to the floor. Which prompted the idle thought (it was a very warm and lazy afternoon) about the possibility of non-melting ice cream and from there to reflections on the general pattern of ice cream innovation.
It’s been with us a long time; the origins of ice cream are shrouded in the usual temporal mists but it’s generally thought to have emerged from eating snow and then someone having the bright idea (in China around 200BCE) of mixing in some milk and rice. Great if you happen to have nearby mountains to provide the necessary cold stuff but if not you need some way of making or at least preserving ice. Which is where the Persians came in with the necessary engineering; around 400 BCE, they developed an early concept for the refrigerator, a large pyramidal structure called a yakhchal that used evaporation and insulation to keep things cool.
Armed with this process innovation and after a few hundred more years they developed a delicacy called a sharbat — an ice-based fusion of various flavourings and a magic ingredient — sugar — which trade with India had given them access to. It’s not a huge stretch of the imagination to think that Xanadu (in Coleridge’s famous poem Kubla Khan) — his ‘…. miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice’ was populated by people happily eating these central Asian delights.
Not surprisingly the idea of ice cream spread across Europe though the pace of innovation slackened somewhat. It took another couple of centuries before ships began returning from the exciting exploratory voyages of the 16th century bringing with them a wonderful range of new flavours and additives — sugar, chocolate, vanilla and many more exotic spices. This kick-started a new phase of product innovation which placed the delicacy firmly on the tables of those people wealthy enough to afford it. Experiments proliferated and it was in England that the idea of mixing in milk was developed; in her cookery book published in 1718 Mrs Mary Eales wrote the first recipe down, based on her experience working as confectioner to Queen Anne:
Take Tin Ice-Pots, fill them with any Sort of Cream you like, either plain or sweeten’d, or Fruit in it; shut your Pots very close…
Lay a good deal of Ice on the Top, cover the Pail with Straw, set it in a Cellar where no Sun or Light comes, it will be froze in four Hours.
Across the pond it was the same story. A confectioner called Philip Lenzi was the first to announce publicly the sale of ice cream, advertising in the New York Gazette in May, 1777 and George Washington indulged his presidential weakness for the delicacy to the tune of a $200/day habit during the summer of 1790. It was one of his chefs, Augustus Jackson, who came up with the valuable process innovation of adding salt to the ice mixture to lower its freezing point.
The only problem with all of this was that the cost of the key ingredient — ice — was so high that ice cream remained firmly at the luxury end of the market.
We can use another innovation lens to help understand what happened next. Abernathy and Utterback’s valuable model of innovation dynamics suggests that emphasis shifts during an innovation’s life cycle; in its early days the attention is on experimenting with the core product idea until a ‘dominant design’ emerges which captures the attributes the market values. This is followed by a shift of interest towards the process innovation side — how to make this cheaper or more reliably.
And in the case of ice cream this shone a spotlight on the core problem. If ice cream were ever to shift from being the exclusive luxury consumed by French aristocrats, US presidents or English monarchs then someone needed to do something about the chilling side of the equation.
That someone was a 23 year-old Boston merchant named Fredric Tudor who in 1806 hit upon the idea of harvesting ice from his father’s farm and shipping it to the (relatively) nearby islands of the West Indies. His ship, the Favorite, made the 1,500 mile journey in three weeks carrying its precious cargo in holds lined with sawdust to act as an insulator. It half-worked; he was able to sell on the half of his cargo which hadn’t melted in Cuba, albeit incurring a significant loss. Following the idea of ‘fail fast’ he followed up on this venture with three more voyages during the following year, all of which compounded his losses.
His business model wasn’t bad; shipping costs were low (because most made the journey to the islands empty to return with cargoes of sugar and fruit) and sawdust was free as a by-product of the timber industry. But it took him 4 years to turn a profit from the venture and his cash flow worsened to the point that he spent several stretches in debtor’s prison during 1812 and 1813. He struggled on and eventually he was able to open up the ice market in cities across the southern states of America.
His gradual success encouraged others to work on the process side; one of his suppliers, Nathaniel Wyeth, developed a horse-drawn plough for cutting huge blocks of ice, opening the door to large-scale harvesting. Others worked on the logistics and insulation side; by 1833 it was possible to sail the 16,000 miles from Boston to Calcutta with a cargo of 180 tons of ice and land over 100 of them on the dockside, ready for sale at a huge mark-up. The increasingly profitable ice trade flourished; by 1886 the industry employed over 40,000 people and cut a record 25 million tons of ice to ship as far afield as Hong Kong or Rio de Janeiro.
It’s at this point that we see another familiar innovation face — disruptive innovation. In 1834 Jacob Perkins had been granted a patent for his “Apparatus and means for producing ice, and in cooling fluids” with which he effectively demonstrated that vaporizing and condensing a volatile liquid in a closed system would do the job. In doing so he outlined the basic architecture which underpins today’s refrigerators; his work influenced a generation of researchers like the young Carl von Linde who beavered away in their laboratories to explore the approach. It wasn’t long before artificial ice making became a reality; by 1873 a patented commercial refrigeration system was on the market. In the years which followed the industry grew — in 1879 there were 35 plants and ten years later 222 making artificial ice.
Effectively this development sounded the death knell for the ice-harvesting industry, although it took a long time to go under. For a while both industries grew alongside each other, learning and innovating along their different pathways and expanding the overall market for ice — for example, by feeding the growing urban demand to fill domestic ‘ice boxes.’ But inevitably the new technology took over as the old harvesting model reached the limits of what it could achieve in terms of technological efficiencies. Significantly most of the established ice harvesters were too locked in to the old model to make the transition and so went under — to be replaced by the new refrigeration industry dominated by new entrant firms.
All of which was good news for the ice cream side of things. The stage was set now for another kind of innovation — market positioning. Anticipating Henry Ford by decades the next wave of innovation was all about turning a luxury product into one for mass consumption. With the falling cost and rising availability of ice the entrepreneurial opportunities became increasingly apparent, not least to Signor Carlo Gatti, a native of the Italian corner of Switzerland who moved to England in 1847. He started out with a small street stall selling roasted nuts and waffles in London and was successful enough to be able, two years later, to open a small café in Holborn selling a variety of coffee, chocolate and confectionery — including ice cream.
His ice came from the nearby Regent Canal via the Regent Canal Company who had followed Tudor’s ideas and diversified into ice harvesting. With them as partners Gatti was able to expand, exhibiting at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and in the same year opening another outlet in Charing Cross, a stand from which people could buy various drinks and confections, including ice cream. He’d got the economics down to the point where he could sell a portion served in a glass shell for one penny — something which became known as a ‘penny lick’.
It helped bring ice cream to the attention of a wide population though it didn’t do much for public health. His imitators (in a classic example of what Joseph Schumpeter called ‘swarming’) soon began offering ice cream everywhere but it was often served under questionable sanitary conditions. Essentially when you had finished your penny lick you handed the glass shell back to the vendor who would give it a perfunctory rinse in what was increasingly dirty water, wipe it with a rag — and then use it for their next sale!
Gatti’s efforts on the supply side to bring ice cream to the masses were matched by those of a cookery writer, Agnes Marshall, whose books jostled with those of Mrs Beeton for a place in the kitchens of a growing number of Victorian households. Her 1888 edition included a recipe for ‘cornets with cream’ which was perhaps the first published version of what became the ubiquitous ice cream cone. It did her reputation no harm; she became known as ‘the Queen of ices’. She helped position ice cream as a standard dish on the menu of households who could increasingly afford to buy ice from a local icehouse and store it in their own ice box.
These developments were mirrored in other countries; Manufacturing ice cream was pioneered in in America in 1851 by a Baltimore milk dealer named Jacob Fussell. Another company called Bassetts began making ice cream in 1861, and then opened theiir own shop in 1885; it’s still available today.
Gatti didn’t stop with selling ice cream. He understood the challenge of scaling innovations and the importance of building a system, a network which could deliver value at scale. He used his early profits to buy into ice storage, opening in 1857 an ‘ice well’ next to the Regent’s Canal where he could store ice for use all year round — and also sell it to others. It was so successful that he built a second in 1862 and also began importing ice from Norway, shipping it up the river Thames, unloading and transferring to barges and then moving it by canal to his warehouses. He quickly became the largest ice dealer in the country and completed his network with the other half of the logistics equation, a fleet of handcarts which took the ice to private houses in the better-off streets of London. And he consolidated his original distribution channel, opening a series of restaurants, cafes and even a music hall in the city.
His ice warehouses also supplied the growing number of small vendors who would make and sell ice cream from stalls and shops, opening up the market on the back of a plentiful supply of the cold stuff. And they also enabled a distribution network for the finished product; by the 1890s ice cream stalls were springing up everywhere and the increasing availability of ice enabled enterprising vendors to take the ice cream where it was needed — in parks on sunny afternoons, outside the opera at night, to the crowds gathering for public festivals and so on.
This trend towards portability of sales outlet led to another example of a common innovation phenomenon — peripheral innovation. In this case it involved the invention, often by small scale user innovators, of a variety of solutions to the sales and distribution problem. People began improvising refrigerated handcarts which could be pushed around, or attaching them to bicycles. And one of them, Italo Marchiony, was doing so in the streets of New York in 1896 He was particularly frustrated with the problem of what to serve his ice cream in; the glass containers which he used needed cleaning before re-use, they were prone to breakage and not a few of them wandered off in the hands of Wall St traders out for a lunchtime stroll and never returned.
So, he began experimenting with an edible container, based on making waffles and then folding them before they cooled into small cups. The idea worked and people began to enjoy the additional taste experience as well as the contents; his business boomed and by 1902 he was running a fleet of 45 ice cream carts, now horse-drawn. He couldn’t keep up with demand for his cups using his family’s kitchen and so developed and patented (in 1903) a machine for making ice cream cups. With the increasing volume he was able to build a successful business, setting up a factory in 1904 to produce cups and later wafers to enable him to sell an ice cream sandwich as an alternative delivery option.
That same year at the St Louis World’s Fair saw ice cream seller Arnold Fornachou running short of paper cups and increasingly desperate to find an alternative. The next-door concession was a stall run by Ernest Hamwi selling a crisp waffle called zalabis. He quickly saw a solution, rolling the waffles into a cone shape (a cornucopia) and in the process solving the problem and inventing a new form for eating ice cream. It caught on and prompted Hamwi to set up in the business of making cones, establishing the Cornucopia Waffle Company and in 1910 founding the Missouri Cone Company.
(This appears to be another case of simultaneous innovation although according to his daughter, Marchiony also exhibited his waffle cups at the same World’s Fair and it was he who invented the cone).
It didn’t really matter; the market grew fast enough to accommodate both of them. By 1924 annual production in the USA reached 245million cones and the idea had spread around the world. Ice cream had become big business and it drew in a number of other players including one of the largest butchers in the UK, the Wall’s company. They saw the potential in diversifying into ice cream since sales of meat traditionally slumped in the summer, and they also had extensive investments and experience in refrigeration. They began experimenting in 1913 and went into full-scale production after the First World War in 1922.
They sold their ice cream in their shops and even going door-to-door and they also mobilised a fleet of bicycles to distribute during the summer of 1923; by 1924 they’d expanded the business with new manufacturing facilities and a new fleet of 50 specially-designed tricycles. Their efforts paid off; by 1927 sales had increased from £13,719 to £444,000.
Ice cream delivery vans were a next obvious step since they could extend the range of coverage and carry more stock on board. Equipped with loudspeakers to replace the bicycle bell they became a feature of every summertime street across the country. They also opened up an interesting sideline in what we might call ‘pirate innovation’ — using a novel idea in unexpected ways.
The city of Glasgow in Scotland became notorious during the 1980s for what were termed the ‘ice cream wars’ in which there was increasing violence between ice cream van salesmen — a classic case of gangland turf wars. These weren’t fuelled by a particularly strong appetite amongst the local population for ice cream; the problem arose because the vans (being highly mobile and working as cash-based businesses) offered an excellent base for illegal trafficking of drugs and stolen goods!
Back to our Abernathy/Utterback model of the innovation life cycle which also points us towards the next innovation wave which occurred in the 1970s. Once a dominant deisgn has been established and process innovation takes over there’s a drift towards maturity — which opens up the possibility of new growth coming as the cycle repeats. In the case of ice cream this was through marketing innovation — repositioning the product.
This may involve significant storytelling, weaving a new narrative around an old idea. In the case of ice cream it changed perception of the product from a simple treat to be enjoyed by children and their indulgent parents on hot days to something which was a much more adult-focused luxury experience. Exotic flavours proliferated and advertising stressed the sophisticated aspect; brands like Haagen Dazs were created which emphasised the sensual pleasures of consuming frozen milk.
Of course, this effectively returned ice cream to where it had started — as something which only the wealthy could afford. Only this time its luxury appeal was to everyone; the rise of such specialist ice cream can be seen today in the amount of refrigerated cabinet space now devoted to it in supermarkets.
Today’s market for ice cream is vast; estimates suggest it will reach $97.85 billion in 2027, up from $71.52 billion in 2021. And that’s without taking the potential demand increase which might come if global warming continues! It also provides further incentive for innovation, with increasing investment into advanced R&D to try and understand things like the micro-crystalline structures of ice cream or the key parameters involved in stimulating taste and texture receptors inside the mouth. So maybe somewhere in a laboratory right now someone is working on my non-melting ice cream idea.
In the high-stakes game of corporate strategy, innovation is often treated as a pure business function. We measure it with metrics like Return on Innovation Investment, patent counts, and new product launches. We manage it with processes, frameworks, and a sterile, bottom-line focus. While these tools are certainly necessary, they are far from sufficient. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I am here to argue that the most transformative, lasting, and impactful innovation isn’t just about what you create; it’s about why you create it. The future belongs to organizations that have successfully engaged the hearts and minds of their employees and customers by building a culture of purposeful innovation.
Purposeful innovation is the strategic integration of a company’s mission and values into every stage of the innovation process. It moves beyond simply solving a market problem to solving a human problem—one that resonates with a deeper sense of meaning and social impact. When innovation is driven by purpose, it stops being a task and starts being a calling. It elevates the work from a mere job to a meaningful contribution, which in turn unlocks a level of passion, commitment, and creativity that no financial incentive alone can ever generate.
The Three Pillars of Purposeful Innovation
Building a culture of purposeful innovation requires a shift in mindset and a commitment to three core pillars:
1. A Shared “Why”: The first step is to clearly articulate and communicate the organization’s purpose. This isn’t just a mission statement on a wall; it’s a living, breathing set of values that guides every decision. Leaders must connect the day-to-day work of innovation to this larger purpose, helping every employee see how their contributions make a difference in the world.
2. Human-Centered Empathy: Purposeful innovation is rooted in a deep understanding of human needs, not just market trends. It requires teams to move beyond data points and financial models to truly empathize with the people they serve. This involves engaging with customers, listening to their frustrations, and understanding their aspirations.
3. Measurable Impact: While purposeful innovation isn’t just about profit, it is not an exercise in altruism without results. The most successful organizations measure their innovation not just in terms of revenue, but also in terms of social, environmental, or human impact. This dual-purpose metric provides a more holistic view of success and reinforces the “why” for the entire organization.
“Profit is not a purpose; it’s a result. When a company’s purpose is to improve lives, profit naturally follows as a measure of the value it has created.”
Case Study 1: Patagonia – The Purpose-Driven Pioneer
The Challenge:
For decades, the outdoor apparel industry was driven by a focus on performance and profit. Patagonia, a brand that began with rock-climbing gear, faced the challenge of competing in a crowded market without compromising its core values. Their “why” was not just to sell products, but to save our home planet.
The Purposeful Innovation Response:
Patagonia has integrated its purpose into every aspect of its business, making innovation a means to an end. Instead of innovating just for new features, they innovate for sustainability. For example, their Worn Wear program is a brilliant example of purposeful innovation. Instead of encouraging consumers to buy new products, they actively encourage them to repair, reuse, and recycle their gear. This program is not just a marketing gimmick; it is a fundamental part of their business model that directly aligns with their environmental purpose.
The Innovation: The Worn Wear program, which includes repair services, a marketplace for used gear, and a fleet of repair trucks.
The Purpose: To reduce consumption and keep products in use for longer, directly contributing to their mission of environmental stewardship.
The Impact: The program has reduced the company’s environmental footprint, built an incredibly loyal customer base, and created a new revenue stream, proving that doing good can also be good for business.
The Result:
Patagonia’s purposeful innovation has made it a leader in its industry and a gold standard for purpose-driven brands. By consistently aligning their business decisions with their core values, they have built an unshakeable level of trust and loyalty with their customers. Their innovation isn’t just about creating a new jacket; it’s about creating a better world, and their employees are deeply engaged in that mission.
Case Study 2: TOMS – The “One for One” Model
The Challenge:
In the early 2000s, TOMS Shoes entered a highly competitive footwear market. The challenge was not just to create a comfortable and stylish shoe, but to stand out in a way that resonated with a new generation of socially conscious consumers. Their “why” was to create a business that could address a social problem at its core.
The Purposeful Innovation Response:
TOMS’s innovation was not in its product design, but in its business model. They pioneered the “One for One” model, a simple yet powerful purpose statement: for every pair of shoes purchased, a pair would be given to a child in need. This model became the brand’s primary reason for being and the engine of its growth.
The Innovation: A direct-to-consumer business model that intertwined sales with social impact.
The Purpose: To provide shoes and, later, other essential goods (like clean water and eye care) to people in developing nations.
The Impact: The model has resulted in millions of pairs of shoes being given away and has inspired countless other companies to adopt similar social impact models. It engaged not only customers but also employees who felt a deep sense of purpose and pride in their work.
The Result:
TOMS’s success proves that a powerful purpose can be the ultimate engine for innovation and brand loyalty. By making its social mission the central focus of its business, TOMS created a community of customers and employees who were not just buying a product, but participating in a movement. While the company has faced challenges and evolved its model, its legacy as a pioneer of purposeful innovation remains a powerful case study for any organization looking to connect its work to a higher purpose.
Conclusion: The Future is Purpose-Driven
In a world where products are increasingly commoditized and customer attention is a fleeting commodity, a strong purpose is the ultimate differentiator. It is the north star that guides innovation, inspires loyalty, and engages every member of an organization, from the leadership team to the newest employee. Purpose is not a nice-to-have; it is a strategic imperative for long-term growth and resilience.
Leaders must stop treating purpose as a standalone initiative and start embedding it into the very DNA of their innovation process. We must empower our teams to ask not just “What should we build?” but “Why does this matter?” By engaging the hearts and minds of our people and connecting their daily work to a meaningful cause, we will not only unlock unprecedented levels of creativity and passion but also build a better world in the process. The era of purposeful innovation is here, and it is the only path to a future that is both profitable and profoundly human.
Extra Extra: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.
Image credit: 1 of 950+ FREE quote slides available at http://misterinnovation.com
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
Incremental Innovation is safer and is a stable way to keep your company going to keep it up to speed and to progress towards something bigger and 
Drum roll please…
All of which was good news for the ice cream side of things. The stage was set now for another kind of innovation — market positioning. Anticipating Henry Ford by decades the next wave of innovation was all about turning a luxury product into one for mass consumption. With the falling cost and rising availability of ice the entrepreneurial opportunities became increasingly apparent, not least to 
