It has not provided people with an improved interpretation of what they already mean by, and expect from, a lamp: a more beautiful object. Rather, the company has proposed a different and unexpected meaning: a light that makes you feel better. This meaning, unsolicited, was what people were actually waiting for.

When Picasso painted, he never thought about a target audience. He didn’t have a target segment of users in mind. But eventually he was not only a great artist. Those who discovered him made also a great business. There is an enormous (and unexploited) business potential also in this type of innovation.”

To understand possible new meanings, the company steps back and looks at the big picture to see what people could love in a yet-to-exist scenario and how they might receive new proposals.

A product’s language is its material, texture, smell, name, and, of course, form (style is only one aspect of a product’s language).

After all, we are humans. We spend our entire lives looking for meaning. Who really believes that we can smile at our spouse and children or cheer our colleagues, and then, after a millisecond, switch off our limbic system and become inhuman when we drive our cars or buy the next peripheral for our offices?

These companies instead search for new possibilities that are consistent with the evolution of sociocultural phenomena but that are not there until a company transforms them into products and proposes them to people. They look for the seeds that they can cultivate into blossoms.

Companies that do not innovate product meanings through design lose a core opportunity and leave it in the hands of their competitors.

“We have a lot of customers, and we have a lot of research into our installed base. But in the end, for something this complicated, it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

The second finding is that people do not buy products but meanings. People use things for profound emotional, psychological, and sociocultural reasons as well as utilitarian ones. Analysts have shown that every product and service in consumer as well as industrial markets has a meaning.