Forget innovation

• How do businesses generate innovative solutions and business opportunities?
• How is value creation practiced from a human-centred perspective?
• How do products and services become part of everyday lives of their users?

The real experts on products and services – users – have knowledge that is vital for businesses. But are businesses able to understand this knowledge and use it in their innovation efforts?

This introduction to innovation anthropology offers tools for rethinking value. It outlines ways for identifying and exploring processes of value creation. The argument suggests that in order to truly create something new, conventional product- and technologycentred innovation needs to be reconsidered.

Innovation anthropology pushes forward a human-centred perspective and argues that innovation activities must be grounded in a thorough understanding of social dimensions of value. Economic value is only possible, if people’s value aspirations are met.

The reader is taken on a journey of current practices in value creation and innovation. The case studies demonstrate how businesses engage with their customers’ worlds while creating new solutions. The innovations presented address the diversity of humanorientated innovation, including insurance services, pharmaceutical packaging, pouches for mobile phones, and sales of digital items.

The authors, anthropologist Minna Ruckenstein and innovation consultants Johannes Suikkanen and Sakari Tamminen, urge their readers to forget the usual innovation talk and focus on the essential – a new kind of value creation.