Our world is being upended in front of our very eyes. And as we watch, we can’t help but wonder, can’t we do better?
The Limits of Technology Innovation
We are awash in technology. We can buy a refrigerator to text us when we run out of milk. We can buy a watch to remind us to breathe. Our smartphone is a portable arcade with games, movies and music at our fingertips. There is simply no shortage of digital tools, clean-tech, clothing-tech, home-tech, media-tech, whatever tech we want to include in our life. Yet, this burst of technology is not delivering a burst in human happiness.
Take access to healthcare. With technology innovation, we analyze bottlenecks, staff utilization, triage protocols, and scheduling software. We pilot incremental improvements. Perhaps we explore AI applications and automation. Sometimes we shave minutes, occasionally hours, off the system but the lived experience—anxious patients, burnt-out staff, families navigating uncertainty—largely remains the same or even worse. How can that be?
This isn’t due to a shortage of investment. Global venture capital investment in digital health startups alone surpassed $250 billion over the past decade with an estimated $1.3 trillion spent globally on broad healthcare digital transformations.
And it’s not just healthcare. We can choose any number of other examples where our lived experiences are getting worse; housing, food, water, jobs despite the proliferation of technology innovation throughout our industries and supply chains.
Why? Because technology is method, not goal. It means mechanics, the process, optimization.
In a relatively stable world, that approach works fine. We can tackle one problem at a time in the comfort of a world we know and understand, changing at a manageable pace, fixing unintended consequences as part of the optimization process. It’s like a cyclist investing thousands of dollars in gear that’s a few grams lighter. The improvement makes a difference because everything else about the race environment is stable.
These experiences give us the expectation that better processes, leaner systems, shorter feedback loops, will optimize our way out of climate change, the housing crisis, healthcare shortages, and the myriad other challenges defining our time. Except they don’t.
The world is changing. Dramatically. Whether we call it a polycrisis or an unfortunate series of wicked problems, it simply confirms what we already now in our gut: we are entering uncharted territory, a new world, and no one really knows what’s next.
Build A Bigger Innovation Story
The legacy innovations that change our lives tend not to begin with a process problem. They begin with a dream, a bold vision for a whole new kind of world, independent of any specific technology.
Consider the creation of national parks.
In the late 19th century, as America’s expansion moved west, artist George Catlin worried about losing the beauty and vastness of forests, valleys and mountains that defined the frontier. The solution was not to optimize logging practices or improve land management workflows. Instead, he and a collection of other policymakers, artists, writers, and citizens imagined a new world: one in which land did not exist to generate immediate economic output, but to preserve a shared future. Thus, they created the first national park in the world at Yellowstone.
National parks were not a better process; they represented a new story about how people could live alongside nature. Once that world was imagined, the institutions, policies, and operational systems followed. Imagination came first. Optimization came second.
In short, the innovation story is much bigger than asking how we use technology. It’s asking how we want to live. It’s a social, creative process enabled by technology but guided by aspiration. The starting point is not the technology in our hands, but the dreams we hold in our hearts. What kind of world do we want for our ourselves, our children and future generations?
The Creative Pivot – Innovation Through Worldbuilding
It’s time to return to that bigger vision of innovation, a place where we build worlds. To reimagine what’s next and make it happen. And wouldn’t you know it, we have the tools to do it. Speculative fiction has long given us a toolset for imagining alternative worlds. What if we treated that toolset not just for entertainment, but as infrastructure for change?
This isn’t an abstract concept. Every fictional world has a cohesive mix of tangible places, technologies, artifacts, social systems, economic systems that are governed by the constraints or rules of the world. The fact that they are fictional, simply expands the range of worlds we experience. The only real difference in worldbuilding for the real world are the constraints or rules of the world. And once we look at our world through the lens of an architect or builder, we realize that we’ve made the mistake of assuming the limits of our current systems are the limits of what’s possible. Change the rules, change the world.
IKEA: Designing a New World
Let’s look at the application of worldbuilding innovation at the enterprise level using IKEA as an example. Before IKEA, furniture was expensive, heavy, long-lasting, and purchased infrequently. Buying it involved sales floors, delivery delays, and an assumption that furnishing a home was something we did once and that was that.
IKEA didn’t begin by asking how to optimize furniture retail — to make furniture incrementally lighter, or faster, or cheaper. It changed the rules. It imagined a different world.
IKEA’s story was not about “cheap furniture.” It was a vision of everyday life where good design is democratic, homes are adaptable, and people are active agents in shaping their environment. The brand expressed a belief: a well-designed life should be accessible.
Trust and value were rooted in product excellence at scale—clean design, functionality, and a consistent aesthetic—rather than symbolic luxury or identity signalling. IKEA built a new world with products as portals into the IKEA experience. Product management here maintains coherence across thousands of SKUs so the world remains recognizable and consistent.
This Isn’t Market-Making. It’s a Product Storyworld.
Once we accept IKEA’s world—that furniture can be affordable, temporary, participatory, and well-designed— it’s hard to imagine shopping anywhere else when we want their style of furniture for a room, home or office. In the end, it redefined the competitive landscape.
Competitors can copy flat-packs. They can copy prices. But they struggle to copy the world.
This same story could be told across Apple, Patagonia, Disney and dozens of other world-defining brands. Exceptional products are market leaders because their products are a portal into an engaging, meaningful new world.
We Need Creative Worldbuilders …
If we were alive during the age of the divine right of kings, the world we live in today would seem like a fantasy novel, not a prediction of the future and yet, here we are.
Fact is, the future is not preordained. It remains to be written. And while there is no doubt that it can be overwhelming to feel the world unravel around us, to see our institutions, economic systems and social structures shaken to the core, there is also no doubt that we can be architects and builders of new worlds.
So, what kind of world do we want to live in? What kind of world would do we want to build?