Do we, and the world, really need more innovation?
I know how that sounds. Innovation is the word everyone celebrates, and almost everyone agrees it is what we need more of. I have been part of that consensus for most of my career and never expected to be the one questioning it. Lately I cannot shake the feeling that something in it has gone missing.
Let us go back to how the word is defined. Innovation is building something new that creates value. Almost everything we celebrate is about the first word. We measure how new a thing is, and a founder’s whole pitch is often built on being first to it. The second word, value is something we tend to assume. We decide a new thing must be worth having simply because it is new. Value is the more profound word of the two, and it is the one we have stopped examining.
Value for whom? For a person, for a company, for society, for the world? These do not always point in the same direction, and a lot of what we call innovation creates value for one of them by taking it from another. A product that wins a company more of your time has not created more value for you. It has moved value from your side of the table to theirs. There is a responsibility buried in the word value, and it is the part we seem to skip.
It gets worse, because value itself has been shrunk to something small. In tech startups, where I have spent most of my working life, value has come to mean doing a familiar thing cheaper, faster and with less friction. Often the thing or the value is not new at all. It is a smoother copy of what already exists, and now that AI can produce that copy overnight, the copies arrive faster than ever while the value inside each one grows thinner. Mind you, everything I mention here is about point solutions, a single product or a service, not the systemic problems that no product on its own can solve.
Most development during the last few decades made have been concentrated around the promise, that taking the effort and friction out of life would free us for better things. Everything now arrives at the door within hours, the week’s groceries and a hot dinner nobody had to cook. A car comes in minutes, and a film starts the second you think of it. Each of these saves time, and each was sold to us as progress. The question we rarely ask is what the saved time is actually for. The promise was that convenience would free us for the things that matter, to learn something hard or to sit with the people we love. Look honestly at where many of those freed hours go, and they often run straight back into the same glowing screens that saved them. Convenience gave us back the time, but it has not always given us back what the time was supposed to be for.
Look at all of it together and you see it running only one way. Picture a room where everyone has crowded into a single corner. The corner is labelled cheaper, faster and frictionless, and it is packed shoulder to shoulder. The rest of the room stands almost empty. Nearly every founder I meet is somewhere in that same corner, building a smoother version of something the world already has, or something no one really needs.
This is innovation, but it is innovation trapped inside an increasingly narrow idea of value. It is not a particularly attractive place to build a business either. People are drawn to what they cannot easily find somewhere else. When everything on the shelf starts to look the same, we lose interest in the shelf and go hunting for the thing that feels different, the bread from an artisan baker who makes only forty a day, or the chair built by someone whose name is on the underside of it. Sameness is the one thing people rarely pay a premium for. The crowded corner is where prices fall and attention moves on.
Sam Jacobs put the deeper pattern well in a recent article. Every technological revolution makes one thing abundant, and in doing so makes something else scarce. The Industrial Revolution made physical goods abundant. The Internet did the same for information and distribution. AI is now making many forms of intelligence and cognitive work abundant. Each wave changes where value moves next.
So what becomes scarce when products, services, choice and increasingly intelligence itself now are abundant?
My own answer is still evolving, but I keep coming back to the same words. Judgment. Meaning. Relationships. Purpose. Peace of mind.
Human history suggests that whenever one thing becomes abundant, we begin searching for what has become harder to find. Perhaps that is why, as the noise rises, people keep turning back toward what is deeply human. Many of the innovations of the past two decades have optimised for speed and convenience while eroding some of these same things. If that is true, then perhaps the next generation of innovation should not compete in the crowded corner at all. It should build where something genuinely valuable has become scarce.
This is where my book begins. Not with the choice of what to build, but with how to build it well once that choice has been made. The ideas in it apply whether you are building the next delivery app, a medical breakthrough or something none of us has imagined yet.
I hope the next generation of founders pauses a little longer before making that first choice. Not because every company needs to pursue the same kind of value, but because that choice shapes almost everything that follows. Before product-market fit, and long before scaling, there is an earlier question that deserves more attention.
What kind of value are you trying to create?
The answer will determine not only the company you build, but also the world you help create.