“The global economy’s problem isn’t best seen as a lack of demand. But as an oversupply of toxic, industrial age junk.”
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This remark, by Umair Haque, is intriguing because usually, the uninterrupted supply of industrial junk is seen as the very motor of economic growth.
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Umair wrote a very strong post about this connection to the economy, and I want to look at this from a different perspective: innovation.
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The ‘oversupply of industrial age junk’ has come to pass when in order to keep making money, companies figured they should just keep selling more stuff.
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Innovation is borne out of this need to keep cranking out new products just to give people a reason to buy more stuff. Most of the time, it has very little to do with meeting actual needs. Every once in a while a game changer comes along, but for the most part it’s just filler designed to keep us buying.
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Take digital cameras. New models every few months, more and more megapixels. I don’t know who needs to shoot billboard photos all of the time, but otherwise that’s just nonsense.
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It’s a well known industry secret that Nokia was not at all happy that their 6310 model lasted for years and years. People loved that phone. Hung on to it for ages. Nokia fired the man who made it. Their average handset is engineered to last for two years. Based on my own experience, the iPhone is not much better.
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Now, 1.2 billion phones were sold last year. If I’m to believe what I see in the grey market in Africa, that number is even higher. About half of those went to first-time buyers. The other half, replacements.
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I want you to take a few seconds and picture the heap of junk that 600 million mobile phones are going to create.
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Landfill, anyone?
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The point is, we’ve become obsessed with stuff, placing the idea of innovation over actual improvement. At the cost of, well, everything else.
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If we are to create a sustainable society across the world, and improve the livelihoods of billions in emerging markets, making electrical cars and using wind power to fire up the TV is not going to cut it.
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A year and a half ago I had a conversation with Saul Griffith about this, and he introduced the concept of heirloom products. The idea that, like in the old days, we should cherish our belongings, be careful of them, and repair them when they break. And I firmly believe that we have to go back to this, in some form or other.
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For those who, like me, work on products, on stuff (as opposed to web things, which only consume electricity), the challenge is going to be to make products that last. Products that can indeed be passed on from father to son like a precious watch. Products where the maker can have an ongoing relationship with his client, not by upselling time and again, but by taking care of him.
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And I really believe we can do this. It will take a big shift in thinking, a big change in ecosystem, we’ll have to retrain a lot of folk. But the main point is, products can last for a long time if you take care of them. If they are well built. I big part of it will to give discarded products a second life in stead of, err, discarding them.
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Even electronic devices could last much longer. I don’t really need a retina display. 99% of the improvement is going to come from new apps. But I’ll get a new iPhone because the current one is fried already – I’m sure that’s not actual wear and tear in the chips.
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Before y’all start tumbling over one another calling me a hypocrite, I concur that the industry I work in (mobile phones) is one of the biggest culprits. But I also know that almost all of the phones I’m selling are going to first-time buyers, and they are solving a very real problem. What’s more, right now the only available answer to the issue is to stop buying stuff altogether which is unlikely.
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The point is then, to see this as a challenge to all of us in research, design, product development, to do some profound innovating. We need entrepreneurs to step up and change the order of business, bring real improvement to consumers, and continue to earn good money without meaninglessly depleting resources and flooding the marketplace with toxic junk.
Rik is one of the founders of Klatergoud.
He's the marketing director of Intivation, a technology company that develops solar powered consumer devices, and a graduate of Delft University of Technology with degrees in Applied Physics and Strategic Product Design.
He writes about entrepreneurship, design thinking, business models, innovation and marketing.
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