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NEW INVENTIONS


We collectively spend a lot of time looking out for ingredients that might make us thrive in business, among these, confidence, team-work, marketing, and a knack at numbers. But in the list of suggested answers, one thing that rarely comes up is self-knowledge.  This is to miss just how many businesses devote their energies to making products and services for customers that don’t exist. These organisations apply their best minds to attempt to solve problems that aren’t connected up to anything that might conceivably bother human beings as they currently exist. These businesses might be developing chairs that no one wants to sit on, publishing books that have nothing compelling to say, opening restaurants with oddly off putting menus or (in extremis) designing a rucksack to hold a baguette. And they do so for what may in essence be a single hugely consequential but simple reason: they haven’t asked themselves what they might truly need more of in their lives. A modesty has held them back. They haven’t had the courage to imagine that what secretly interests them might be of sizeable interest to others — and, conversely, that what bores them may be an indication of an important fault, whatever colleagues or research agencies might indicate. They have been too shy to push forward their sincere thoughts about what it would be pleasant to eat for dinner, what might really make for a sexy pair of boots or trousers or what device they would need to solve crucial domestic challenges. They have failed to consult their most accurate bellwether of desire: themselves. Good innovators on the other hand are those rare beings who remain unusually adept at looking out for faint yet vital signs of interest from deep within their own minds — even when these signs are utterly ignored by the market as it stands. They dare to think: "I might love a hotel where they’d…" "What about a skirt that…" "Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a machine that…" "Imagine if when it came to banking…" They have not surrendered their hold on their own centres of pleasure and are therefore optimally positioned to intuit the desires of others  What we call profit is in essence the reward for looking more deeply into our collective semi-conscious needs than the competition — and thereby of knowing the audience better than they know themselves. In the best new businesses, we recognise our own latent desires, returned to us with discipline and coherence. This is why one of the unexpected priorities of an education in business might be to instill a greater trust in our own appetites. The future of successful enterprise may lie in sticking more loyally to some of our most personal excitements and needs.

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