That sounds way too sensationalistic, and it probably is. But the drama of that statement is certainly rooted in truth.

Allow me to explain.

Several years ago, I got enamored with the concept of ‘innovation’.

So much so, in fact, that it became a personal buzzword, advocacy, unifying battle-cry.

I read all the books and delved into all of the websites. Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The Innovator’s Dilemma. Innovation : The Five Disciplines. Closing the Innovation Gap. Innovation to the Core. Open Innovation. Innovation Nation. Innovation X. If the book had the word ‘innovation’ in its title (even the sub-title), it had a 90% chance of ending up on my bookshelf.

I would get indoctrinated in the religion of IDEO (the Shopping Cart video and the innovation bibles, The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation). In fact, it was a dream come true when I met Brian Quebengco and became a partner in the industrial design firm, Inovent.

For a time, some really cool friends and I put up Kolektib – an Innovation Hub in the creative hustle-and-bustle of Cubao X. We did Innovation Workshops internally and externally. It was an exquisitely fun time.

Even social entrepreneurship, for me, was a form of innovation – albeit social innovation. Hapinoy and Rags2Riches are expressions of melding social development with business models, a rather revolutionary approach which would certainly qualify as innovating.

I eventually synthesized my knowledge. I wound up conceptualizing, creating, and teaching a class in Ateneo on Innovation. It would tackle the why’s, the what’s, the how’s of the topic. I wanted to transmit the spirit to a next generation of innovators which would try to conquer and/or change the world.

The one line i always wanted my students to remember : Innovate or Die.

But beginning last year, my innovation lens would slowly shift. Not on a different tangent, but rather on a different depth.

I’m significantly more experienced and quite wiser. For all intents and purposes, I’ve changed. But more importantly, the world has changed at a mind-spinning rate – far outstripping my own evolution.

The first decade of the 21st Century was characterized by dizzying change, hyper-competition, unbridled growth – all of the factors that led to an innovation explosion. Globalization was at full-swing, the Internet began to fulfill its promise of changing everything.

And everything seemed possible. Growth was so palpable and reachable, and so businesses began pouncing on the massiveness of the opportunity. Driven by sheer momentum, they just plowed full steam ahead.

An innovation avalanche would ensue.

Innovation and Design consultancies would have a field day. So many new products, services, processes, and business models would emerge. I should know – it’s what I taught :

How Zara had reinvented the supply chain, allowing them to launch new fashion lines at lightning speed.

How the Wii would tackle the Blue Ocean of game consoles, beating the higher-performing Xbox 360 and Playstations by going on a different tangent and tackling non-gamers.

How Procter & Gamble used Open Innovation and launched connect + develop, unleashing a torrent of growth for their brands under AG Lafley’s watch.

More consumers were opening their wallets, and companies were feasting.

But towards the end of the decade, the world would undergo yet another step-change, perhaps an even larger one than the last.

Crises of global proportions would enter the lexicon.

A financial crisis would infect the world over, leading to national economies teetering on the brink. It was a full-blown meltdown and it washed over countries like a worldwide tsunami.

And speaking of tsunamis, the world became a real-life disaster movie. Environmentalists have been banging the alarm bells on the planet for so long, but it’s certainly only in the past few years that climate change has become real to the person on the street. When Typhoon Ondoy hit the Philippines, it was a shock to the system – it dumped one month’s worth of rain in half a day, causing floods in areas we never imagined were possible.

This climate change crisis is of course linked to to the energy crisis – our over-dependence on carbon-based fuels. Generations ago it wasn’t tangible, but now we see just how finite non-renewable energy is. It’s like we’ve got lung cancer and yet ironically still need two packs of smokes a day just to keep on moving.

And while all this was happening, the gap between the rich and the poor continued to widen. The proportion of the world’s population that survives under $2 a day still goes between a third to one-half of the total human race! (depending on which statistics you look at). Without a doubt, the population and poverty crisis continues to rear its ugly head.

And so in the span of a decade, we went from an age of seemingly unbridled growth … and plummeted into an age of uncertainty. An Age of Massively Complex Problems.

And that’s why a nagging feeling in my gut gradually snowballed, until my lens shifted.

I remember some of the projects that were conceptualized in my Innovation Class. A better kind of toothpaste. Refillable packaging for laundry detergents. Heck, even an innovative cigarette that would light without matches. Of course there were some that were more interesting – especially those who were in the social innovation track.

But with all due respect to my former students, it was the teacher who was at fault. We were thinking too small. We were throwing our energies at the wrong things. (just look at my slides)

Power is useless, if misdirected. Same goes for Innovation.

Innovation is good at tackling any problem, but it can be so much greater if it tackled the right ones.

And so I’m drawing a line on the sand, demarcating where my old thinking ends and my new perspective begins :

The only problems worth solving, worth investing your life in, are meaningful ones.

In an Age of Massively Complex Problems, do we really need to design a better toothbrush?

Do we still want to use innovation to drive unbridled growth and overconsumption, for things that people don’t really need but we’d just want them to buy?

Do we want to continue ransacking the planet with novel products that don’t really add anything extraordinary to people’s lives?

I say, that may have its place in the world, but certainly not in mine.

I will invest my time, my resources, my life, in innovation that, frankly, matters.

Meaningful innovation that adds real value to people’s lives, that tackles real problems plaguing individuals, society, and the world.

A lot of Big Problems. A lot of Big Opportunities. A lot of Big Innovations needed.

I call this new evolution of my definition, Innovation(+). Innovation plus, Innovation positive, Innovation with meaning.

The time has come for us to put collective energies into innovations that can create positive differences in people’s lives, for society, and the world at large.

We need platforms for participation; Heck let’s take it a step further as Platforms for Activation – where people are actively engaged in helping things move not just onwards, but upwards.

And so it’s in these specific challenges that I will be investing my energies on :

1. Social Innovations at the Base-of-the-Pyramid
- How can we co-create business models, products, and services that serve essential needs for those that live under $2/day?
- How can we make the poor active participants and co-creators in the common drive to get them out of poverty?

2. Development of Technologies, Products, and Services that Positively Advance the Human Condition
- How can we create new innovations in education, healthcare, energy, and communications that sustainably serve the needs of this generation and the next?
- How do we use innovation and design thinking to tackle everyday problems of society – traffic gridlock, transportation, crime as some examples? (in fact, IDEO has evolved Design Thinking into tackling Big Problems – just look at Open IDEO).
- How can the Big Brands, Big Products, and Big Services reinvent themselves into positively advancing the human condition?

3. Harnessing the Web for Massive Connection, Collaboration, and Change
- As I mentioned earlier – how do we create Platforms for Activation? I can think of no better example than how Iceland recently engaged its citizens to write the constitution.
- How can we use web to either rebuild or create new institutions? Financial institutions, Educational Institutions, Healthcare Institutions, even Governments?

4. A New Kind of Society
- How do we transition a paradigm shift from the traditional economics of GDP into one that measures happiness and prosperity?
- How do we go from unbridled production-consumption-growth into true, sustainable living?
- How do we balance the currents of globalization, localization, and community?

5. Innovating for The Planet
- There’s just no way getting around tackling the Climate Crisis head-on, it’s quite simply the biggest problem that we as a collective species have to contend with.
- In fact, I love what Al Gore writes in his new book/app ‘Our Choice’. In addressing the Climate Crisis, he wants ‘to make the rescue of civilization the central organizing principle of our politics, economics, and action.’

So there. A new personal roadmap, a clearer direction, a manifesto on where I wish Innovation+ will go. Where it will take us, or where we can drive it towards.

One of my all-time favorite quotes is by technologist Alan Kay – “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Such wise words in an Age of Massively Complex Problems, an age which needs more and more of us to do Innovation(+).

Heima is a lifestyle & home designs store in the center of the creative universe, Cubao X – which by no accident is also home to Rags2Riches.

Love2010 – an art exhibit with corresponding candles, cupcakes, and  cotton candy machine – was celebrated in true Heima fashion, which is to say that it was a hyper-real kitsch-kicking experience :

Love2010 instructions for the night

the Art Exhibit

the centerpiece Cotton Candy machine; photo credit www.arlenesy.com

No odd wheel here – (4) couples Lex Reyes & Marielle Nadal, Birdie Salva & Arlene Sy, Heima’s Bong Rojales & Rossy Yabut, Moi with Reese

Now, the reason I can’t help but talk about Heima is that everytime I go inside the place, I just feel an inexplicable sense of joy; Almost as if some unknown happiness buttons were pushed and lights would go up inside my head.

And it really has everything to do with the overall experience and feel of being there – as Reese and I have had the pleasure of being so innumerable times already :

You see, one has to go inside Heima in order to fully appreciate it.

The place is literally a canvass of Rossy’s playful designs coupled with – intended pun on its way – the couple’s eclectic taste. It’s as if every turn, glance, movement you make reveals new eye candy that makes you say ‘oooohhhh nice!!!’

Whether it be Rossy’s happy couch, intriguingly beautiful art & decor, Bong’s lomo collection, Counting Sheep’s wall stickers, etc etc etc -  it’s curated happiness-delivery to design enthusiasts at its most unapologetic; a veritable assault on one’s aesthetic sensibilities.

This rumination on Heima and their Art of Happiness actually reminded me of Don Norman – a leading global design thinker who wrote landmark books The Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design – and his talk in TED.

Fittingly enough, his presentation is entitled “The 3 Ways that Good Design Makes Me Happy”, and it pretty much elucidates what i’ve been waxing about in this blog post :

IDEO just released version 2 of it’s Human-Centered Development Toolkit.

It’s essentially a free downloadable toolkit using Ideo’s design processes, as applied to the social development world. This was made possible through a collaboration with the Gates Foundation, IDE, ICRW, and Heifer International.

This intersection of design and development is really a combination of two of my most passionate interests.

And while I’ve followed both fields in parallel these past couple of years, the impending synergies are about to reach a tipping point.

My initial exposure to this was the crossover of development and engineering/invention. I was totally blown away by MIT Professor Amy Smith’s talk in TED, as she narrated her d-Lab and the crazy things they were inventing there.

In the same way that CK Prahalad started a revolution in getting businesses to consider the ‘fortune at the bottom-of-the-pyramid‘, I personally think that Amy Smith’s talk opened the floodgates for engineers to develop products for those who live on $1 to $2 a day.

Another important milestone on the design-meets-development path was the creation of OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), spearheaded by technology visionary Nicholas Negroponte. While it’s currently a debate whether the program is a success, nobody can argue with the mission of democratizing computing to the developing world’s children :

But during the course of OLPC’s technological development, more design skills needed to be brought into the fray. In fact, Negroponte would eventually turn to Yves Behar’s fuseproject – an industrial design firm – to bring the One Laptop Per Child into reality. This move I feel proved that not only engineering skills were needed to create the OLPC, but a designer’s mind as well.

In fact, the designer’s input into development work has become so critical that it has become a field of expertise in itself. One particular thought leader in this space is Niti Bahn from the emerging futures lab, who also wrote a very interesting article on ‘The 5D’s of BOP Marketing’.

Examples are now abound on products designed for the BoP, one just has to google. My personal favorites include Kickstart’s moneymaker pumps, VisionSpring glasses, and Tata’s Nano. Here in the Philippines, Hapinoy has been talking to entrepreneurs and organizations who want to bring in products designed especially for the BoP, and we are thinking about the best ways to introduce them into the market.

It’s a huge market, a huge need, and a huge opportunity – both to profit and to help. And hopefully, with IDEO’s new toolkit, more entrepreneurs, designers, engineers, and development workers can collaborate and create more products that will not only be sold t0 – but also serve – the base-of-the-pyramid.

Here’s his list :

1. Maker Instinct: The ability to exploit your inner drive to build and grow things, as well as connect with others in the making.

2. Clarity: The ability to see through messes and contradictions to a future that others cannot see. Leaders are very clear about what they are making, but very flexible about how it gets made.

3. Dilemma Flipping: The ability to turn dilemmas – which, unlike problems, cannot be solved – into advantages and opportunities.

4. Immersive Learning Ability: The ability to immerse yourself in unfamiliar environments; to learn from them in a first-person way.

5. Bio-Empathy: The ability to see things from nature’s point of view; to understand, respect, and learn from nature’s patterns.

6. Constructive Depolarizing: The ability to calm tense situations where differences dominate and communication has broken down – and bring people from divergent cultures toward constructive engagement.

7. Quiet Transparency: The ability to be open and authentic about what matters to you – without advertising yourself.

8. Rapid Prototyping: The ability to create quick early versions of innovations, with the expectation that later success will require early failures.

9. Smart Mob Organizing: The ability to create, engage with, and nurture purposeful business or social change networks through intelligent use of electronic and other media.

10. Commons Creating: The ability to seed, nurture, and grow shared assets that can benefit other players – and sometimes allow competition at a higher level.

—

Is it just me, or are most of these skills part of the DNA of Designers (or Design Thinkers, as the new thinking suggests)?

Let’s run through the list :

The Maker Instinct and Rapid Prototyping are no-brainer skills of designers, what with their incessant need to go from concept sketches to getting their hands dirty and building stuff;

Clarity is a perspective that is inherently designer-centric – an abstractive mindset that sees what can be, and not just what is; Whereas Dilemma Flipping brings to mind the designers’ problem-solving nature – they just have a way of reducing complexity into very simple solutions.

On the collaborative front – designers are masters in Constructive Depolarizing; In fact, by their very nature they work across multi-disciplinary teams with extremely varying backgrounds and fields of expertise. From that standpoint, constructive engagement doesn’t get more real than that.

Taking it a step further, crowdsourcing designers enhance this collaboration by utilizing the power of social media in Smart Mob Organizing. Not only that, designers use an arsenal of technology tools – from videos to simulations to prototypes -  to convince and influence their clients, bosses, peers, companies, friends, and the general public into their point-of-view.

Immersive Learning Ability then dovetails into designers’ practice of ethnography and computer simulations/prototypes; While bio-empathy draws from designers’ seeking inspiration in unconventional places. In fact, there are numerous designers who are using bio-mimicry as fuel for their work.

Commons creating is the open-source mindset of designers, of how their work contributes to a vocabulary and milieu that others can build upon for the future.

Looking at all these skills, I rest my case.

Want to lead in the future? Learn how to be a designer.

I got myself a birthday gift yesterday.

An iMac G4, the “lampshade” incarnation of this iconic computer.

The funny thing is that I didn’t buy it to use it. I got it because I just love collecting lustfully designed Apple stuff.

This Apple machine is not just a machine; It’s a piece of art.

It’s ambiently appealing furniture.

And it got me thinking.

This was an emotional purchase. I just needed to have it. I don’t need another computer, after all.

And looking at it now gives me a weird sense of joy, as if I were playing with a real live pet. *the flexible crane monitor is so fun to move around!*

It’s something that Apple products are brilliant at. Communicating personality.

I remember when I was in Singapore a couple of years back. A friend had just bought his first iPod. Cradling it in his hand gave him that similar sense of joy that i feel with my new toy. In fact, he was so happy with it that he gave it a name, dubbing it “Snoop”. The it became a he.

The technical term for this is “anthropomorphization”. Wherein people relate with objects as if they were other people. The object begins to take on a personification.

But it cuts both ways. People can treat objects with disdain – just think of all those images of people shouting at traffic lights or kicking errant vending machines.

Or they can evoke positive emotions, like boys talking to their cars. Or women cuddling their jewelry.

As a product designer, you definitely want the latter. In a very twisted sense, the products that truly succeed become almost like a best friend, or a lover.

Now, back to my new toy …

On our way to a brainstorming-consultation for Rags2Riches in TriNoma, Reese, Memey, and I chanced upon a street vendor selling these funky eyeglasses-moustache-torotot contraptions.

The vendor-guy was actively playing with it as he walked under the unforgiving Saturday sun.

I couldn’t resist. He just looked kickass dumb funny . And so I signalled his attention, inquired, and finally haggled to buy a set of three for a hundred bucks. (marketing lesson : demo demo demo!)

That was quite possibly the best hundred bucks I spent in recent weeks.

What construed was a pure hour’s worth of stomach-turning laughter for the three of us. We torototed our way through and around Mindanao Avenue, to the TriNoma parking guards, all the way into the mall weekend-goers.

We looked kickass dumb funny and weird, sure. But it was pure-as-heck enjoyable.

For the price of one tall Starbucks cafe latte’, we had such an energizingly funny afternoon.

All from a piece of China-manufactured cheap plastic and paper.

Which had me thinking.

What kind of experiences are you offering your customers?

What kind of human moments are you producing, the kind that makes your product an emotional purchase inasmuch as it is a logical purchase?

—

Cranium – the company that makes really fun games – has a term for it.

It’s called “moment engineering”.

Each board game is designed and engineered for a specific moment. For example, a board game can be designed for a rainy stay-at-home moment between mother and child. Etc etc etc.

How about you?

What moments are you engineering your products and services for?

And as with my P100 purchase, it doesn’t have to be an extremely luxurious experience to make it absolutely memorable.