C21 VALUE

  Ville Tikka: You have recently authored a book called Humanity in the Machine: What Comes After Greed that explores the possibilities to rethink both value and value creation in the age of intelligent and ubiquitous digital technology. Could you explain what is your take on value and how do you define value creation in relation to the technologies we develop?

Brian David Johnson: In the beginning it was about the value of the products that we make at Intel, but more recently I’ve been thinking about value in relation to profit, and optimization, when it comes to the businesses and technology. The book Humanity in the Machine: What Comes after Greed? looks at the high-frequency and algorithmic trading as a way of examining if and how technology could be optimized for something else than profit. I started by looking at how all these algorithms are designed for profit—as that’s how they currently create value. I believe there’s nothing wrong with profit, but when you have excessive profit you have greed and that’s not a good thing. After all, it’s one of the seven deadly sins. 

So the question was if we could define value creation differently and optimize for something other than profit. I went out and started asking people the ultimate question, “can we optimize for something other than profit,” since what you are optimizing for is what you are designing for. I would ask the algorithmic traders and they said, “Yes certainly! You could easily optimize for fairness or for quality.” For high-frequency traders, there are a limited number of signals that their algorithms can go out and look for. So they look at something like liquidity, and liquidity basically says, “a stock that gets traded a lot is a stock that will get traded a lot, a stock that doesn't get traded very much is a stock that won’t get traded very much.” But you don't have to only look at liquidity. You can look at financials, you can look at stability, you can look at the fact that it isn't traded very much, that it’s actually being held for a very long time, which is a different metric. This means you could optimize your technology based on how you define its objectives.

So that was it! That was the thing that I wanted to understand. To answer your question on value, firstly how I define value is that value is defined by people. Ultimately, there is no actual definition of value at a very high level. People define that value. What we optimize for is a personal choice, that we ultimately, as we design these systems, whether the systems be technological systems, or business systems, or ecosystems, we design our own humanity into these systems. We design our hopes, dreams, and values; we are a very value laden people, all of us. We put our values and our definition of value into our technology and systems. 

I went around and asked people “what are you optimizing for?” and I found wonderful things, like the peer-to-peer lenders who are optimizing for the idea that everybody should be able to own a home—the American dream. They said that they could, because they are lending money to people who a bank would never lend money to, and their idea was not only to make a profit. Their idea was actually to get money into the hands of these people so that it could transform people’s lives. They were not a philanthropic organization and they had created a business underneath, but what they were optimizing for was not specifically profit. They had made a decision to optimize for something different altogether.

Ultimately—once you realize that we are value-laden people who put our values into our technologies and our businesses—that means you have to make a decision. We can design systems that not only allow us to be more human, but we can design systems to allow us to be better humans. So that was the idea, in this book Humanity in the Machine, that what comes after greed is what we decide comes after greed. 

  Ville Tikka: I think that is a very powerful and energizing idea. How do you then allow people to contemplate the different ways of optimizing technology and to design truly alternate solutions—and value—based on those ideas? For example, how does that happen in your own work and projects at Intel?

Brian David Johnson: In my work, I deal with social sciences, along with technologists and economists, and we are there to define how people live, shop, love, worship and die, and to define the human impact of the technologies that we are building. What I take from that, and what drives me as a futurist, is that I believe the value we create at Intel comes through our goal to use our technology to make the lives of people better. Ultimately, that is how we judge our success. Again, that definition of better could be ‘more efficient’ or ‘more productive’, but it also could be healthier, happier, more entertained, more productive and more sustainable lives. It should be the role of technology to serve humans, and actually make their lives better.

Technology has reached a point—specifically in high-tech—where we are only bounded by the limits of our imagination. We need to imagine these possible futures, these values, the things that we can do. Then we can go in build them. This is my day job. The work that I do is called “future casting”, and it looks ten to fifteen years out and models how people will have to interact with technology. It is an effect-based model, so it does not describe the thing, it describes the experience that is produced by the thing, because if you can describe the future experience produced by the thing, you've created the requirements to build the thing; whether that thing is an object, business, or ecosystem, it doesn't matter. It’s a documented and transparent process that begins with social science to understand human beings, not demographics or markets, and the wonderful complexity of our human race on a scientific level. We work with a large team of social scientists—including ethnographers and anthropologists—and look at the future technical capabilities within Intel and outside. Then the question that we ask ourselves is, “how do we use that technology to make people's lives better?” 

  Ville Tikka: For me, technologies become valuable when they have a meaning and are meaningful for people. At its simplest, this means that we understand how there should be a defined purpose behind the technologies we develop.

Brian David Johnson: I think you're right, that we live in a time where we have to—especially with technology—understand that we imbue that technology with our values, and that we are actively making something that isn’t an accident anymore, because technology has progressed to the point that it affords us that. We can actually go and do that, whereas before we just tried to get it to work. Technology is now actually outpacing our own imagination—our ability to imagine a far better future than we have today.

Just two generations ago, like in the generation of Alvin Toffler and others, futurists did not usually get to see the futures they envisioned, because it took so long for them to happen. Now, for myself, this is very different. As a futurist—something I have been doing for 20 years—I have witnessed how the big visions of the future have come to fruition and helped to build them. I have seen this happening twice and I think this is absolutely unheard of. These are big crazy visions that drive entire organizations.

  Ville Tikka: That is so true and so interesting. What were the two visions that you’ve helped to bring into life?

Brian David Johnson: One was the “screenification of our lives”. I wrote a book called Screen Future about it, which looked how in the turn-of-the-century we were living in a world where if you wanted to make a phone call you went to your phone, If you wanted to go to the internet you would go to your computer, If you want to watch television you would watch television. And what my work said, was that if you had a screen that had some computational power, energy, storage, and a connection to the Internet, then that screen would give you your TV, your movies, your phone call, your Internet. Again, this has happened, so it sounds like it was not a big deal, but I think back to when I started working on it, it was crazy. It was insane that you would be able to watch live television on one of these things. That of course is the curse of being a futurist in the 21st century. That is to say that you come up with these visions, and then people say what are you going on about? It’s not that big a deal.

Bruce Sterling, the science fiction writer and novelist, and a friend of mine, once joked that the goal of any futurist should be to become mundane. So when the future arrives, you feel like it's always been there. That really is my job. My job is not to astound people with wonder, because people cannot be blindsided by wonder constantly, because they would get no work done.

The second one is one we’re actually in the midst of, what is actually happening right now, which is this thing that comes after screens, the notion that you will have the ability to turn anything into a computer. That you will be able to turn your house into a computer, you will be able to turn a building or your car into a computer. I could turn my shirt into a computer, even my body into a computer. It's what comes after the screens. These computers will not have screens; they will have a very non screen-based interface. That is really fascinating, because then you are essentially living inside a computer. We live in a world that is so computationally rich that you are essentially living in a large computational system, which is a wonderful thing, because you can optimize that system. So if you live in a home that is full of computational power, you can optimize that home for efficiency. But you can also optimize it for comfort, joy, humor, or cultural awareness. You can optimize it for many things. The same goes for a city, for example. 

So we're beginning to see how a world of non screen-based computers is starting to proliferate, and we have self-driving cars, and all these things that are just coming. These are the two worlds in all the work that I have done, that you actually are beginning to see happen.

  Ville Tikka: In our research, one of the key ideas is that value is always created in relationships between people or between people and things. And when all these virtual and physical objects become connected, they become social and can facilitate new kinds of relationships and create new meanings. It's really fascinating to imagine a situation where value creation means optimizing our relationships between these complex, networked systems for meaningful experiences and valuable things. In a way, it totally changes the logic of creating new value.

Brian David Johnson: To take what you just said, and bring it back to the world of engineering and computation, we can consider that as a system. In a complex system where you have multiple devices and enough computational power to understand the nuances of human relationships, it means the relationship that we have with our technology and each other changes. 

Our entire relationship for the last century with technology has been command and control. I asked the machine to do something and it did it for me, but really in the last ten years we have begun to see that becomes a much more relationship-based interaction. How we act and interact with the technology, even our screen-based technology, becomes relationship-based. It knows things about us, it knows us individually, and it can actually do things for us and on our behalf.

This is what actually led me to the research at the Humanity in the Machine book. It was thinking about what would that look like, if machines go off and do things for you. I think if you live in a small home, or in a smart city, it needs to understand you. But how you program your home is simply by living. How you program the algorithms on Amazon or Netflix is simply by living. Watching television. By doing what you would normally do. Those algorithms are now being programmed to fine-tune themselves to not only how you get build, but also what recommendations they make. This is very early days, the primordial ooze, but you do see that it’s in a very elegant way, a radically different and subtler way of interacting.

I think this relationship-based computational approach is much lovelier, because how we define these relationships is how we define our humanity. Our humanity is defined by the relationships that we have. So, if we can base our computational systems to value humanity they can actually amplify our humanity, and in a way make us more human. That’s my hope. I’m an optimist.

  Ville Tikka: That is really taking the human-technology interaction to a next level, basically shifting our focus from plain interactions to new valuable relationships with technology. How do you deal with these complex concepts at Intel and make them actionable?

Brian David Johnson: One of the approaches has been something we call science fiction based on science fact, to actually understand the human impact of technologies through social science and develop good science fiction stories that are about people and based on based on science facts. So you can literally prototype the human impact, the cultural impact, and even the legal impact of these new technologies. You can use it as a way to explore not only the futures that you want, but also the futures that you don't want. The darker side, which I have done a lot of writing on, which is saying that it is important for us to explore also those dark places, because the entire future casting process embraces the fact that the future isn’t an accident, and the future is not set. 

The future is built every day by the actions of people, and we have to ask ourselves what is the future that we want, and what is the future that we want to avoid. And we have to define it, because then we can turn around and look backwards, and start to build that future. That involves the collection of everything from the social science, from computer and technical data, from the economics and the trends, from the global interviews, and designers—because designers are the ones who then can take the definition of that experience—and also from even the science fiction.

But there are two key things that I should mention about the processes. I usually tell this for the people that I work with, and I've done this not only for Intel, but I do it for government, start-ups, and lots of other people. And what I tell them is that “based on all of these inputs the model that we have constructed is one that is 100% accurate. You have to accept that it is 100% accurate. You know this because the model is only as good as its inputs, and so based on the inputs it is 100% certain. But the other thing that I can tell you with 100% accuracy is it will change.” Future casting embraces uncertainty and says, “we know that it will change, but it is within that change that innovation will come.” 

That uncertainty is the landscape of innovation, and—from complex systems theory—you want to keep your future as undefined as possible. The moment you close a system that system has an expiration date. It could be tomorrow, or it could be ten years from now. You stamped it the moment you limited it. So what we try to do is to try to embrace that uncertainty as much as possible, and use it as a way to explore possible new places to define and create value. It's really in that uncertain area where you will find new value, and new business opportunities.

Now as principle engineer at Intel, that is heresy. Because the whole point of engineering is to do away with as much uncertainty as possible, but I've written a few things called “engineering uncertainty”, about how you can take these systems and keep them as uncertain as possible, because we are actually creating systems. We are creating complex systems. That certainly is where you can create value. It is where value creation can come from, because typically if you have already defined it there's no new value creation. You’re only doing incremental improvement.

  Ville Tikka: In many ways that captures the essence of the research we are doing, as our aim is to describe some human-based fundamentals of value creation in this complex world and with these complex systems, and hopefully to understand the emerging principles for creating better services and products that both serve the humanity and help people in their everyday lives.

Brian David Johnson: I think it goes back to that idea that I said, that the future is build by the actions of people. The future is not an accident. Value creation and the definition of value is that it can be defined. I think that is the secret of the wonderful time that we're living in. That is how I define value creation—people define it—and how I define the future—people build it. 

We work with human sciences and we think it’s a wonderful, although not new, approach in business to understand human behavior and what is valuable for people. Human sciences include the softer social sciences, such as political science, sociology, ethnography, anthropology, ethnology, etc., but also the harder human sciences, such as contemporary psychology or aspects of philosophy. The idea is to intake a volume of insight and theory to better understand what it means to be a human being and a social being. What it means to use things and interact with the world. And take all that great insight there is, and theories that exist, and apply them to the business world, which is not an easy undertake. 

There's no grand theory and there's very little cumulative value created across the disciplines. On top of that, there’s a lot of ambiguity within the disciplines. For example, philosophers still disagree about what it means “to be”. They still haven't even solved that one. And sociologist still disagree about what is ‘social’, and linguists still argue whether language is a representation of something, or if it is something in and of itself. That’s really problematic, because if you happened to be educated in the soft sciences or human sciences you are not well-equipped to be clear about what you're saying, to help people that don't have your background to understand what it is you know. 

So I think one of the things we are trying to do – I don't know if we've done that yet – is to take a lot of those basic ideas and insights from the human sciences, and applying them to the world of business by making them more tangible, simple to understand, and normative. I also think that finding out human needs is actually quite simple, it's not very difficult. Applying it to a business, that's complex. Getting people to understand. Getting engineers to understand what it means. Getting leaders to see ideas in the same way. Having the R&D people and the marketing people to look at the same direction. Implementing things. That's really hard! 

    Ville: It’s a complex world out there for sure! So why is this holistic, yet human-centric approach becoming now seemingly more relevant for business? 

  Mikkel: I feel that our contribution – and not only ours as this is something that's happening all over the world and in all big companies I have been acquainted with – is to answer to the fatigue of "default problem-solving”. It’s a fatigue for mostly deductive methods to test out what you already think about the world with highly quantitative tools and extrapolating the future by looking in the past. 

If you look at strategies in many companies, you think they are really sophisticated and that the strategy work has become nearly a science of its own. But when you take a closer look you’ll notice all the strategies are the same in these days. They all have the same three components, describing how the companies aim to defend the current market, attack emerging markets, and attract talent. And we can really start to sense a deep fatigue in what you learn in a business school and in the ideas that management is a science that can be applied to any person or company, that leadership is a matter of a technique, and that algorithms and big data can solve the business problems, and things like that. 

So people have started to search for something else, and I think that for a while that led to competing by leaving those default ideas and exploring the intuitive blue-sky thinking and creative problem solving. You know, the idea that you go to an office and brainstorm and you're creative and design-y. Design thinking is also part of that, I think. That has also disappointed the business in a big way. It’s now gotten to the point where people think “no, that kind of creativity is probably too shallow, sorry, that's not useful for our business”. It's fun, but it doesn't really help us design the future or find the value that we talk about.

I guess there is currently this fatigue with both the default way of thinking, but also with creativity in business. And I think that's the really interesting field; to be able to enlighten a company with new ways to think about its future, its strategy, its products, or prices and sales channels with the rich understanding the human sciences have to offer. 

We don’t yet know what it exactly will eventually be, but we know ReD is part of the answer, although not the whole answer as there are many others too. I don’t know any big companies that are not fully engaged to understand who are the people they are serving, what are their needs and what’s their everyday life like. There’s a lot of activity there, but this is still a field in its infancy and I think it's going to be a dominating paradigm in solving the business problems along with the quantitative algorithmic approach that will be there as a supplement. So for me, honestly, it's a journey that has only started. 

    Ville: To make things slightly more tangible, could you provide an example of how understanding people should happen in practice to support new value creation and innovation?

  Mikkel: Well, there are different levels to answer that question. To begin with, there’s this tradition of market research – where a lot of the money is currently spent – to understand customers, users, people and culture with very wrong methods that suggest people simply consists of a body, a soul, and a brain that all can be studied separately. An example would be scanning people's brains, or to do surveys and focus groups, to understand human behavior. It's the wrong way to understand people, and the reason it's wrong is what philosophers call ontology, which means what does it mean to ‘be’.

We firmly buy into a different idea that comes from Martin Heidegger, which is called "being in the world". This means people are nothing in themselves. They’re only something in the world that’s around. For example, dentists cannot be understood by scanning their brains. You have to understand their world. A dental world. A football player like Messi cannot be understood by asking him many questions, but you have to look at the culture and the world of football.

So, if this is the case, then the way to unlock the human reality ought to be understanding worlds instead of understanding individuals. So that's the first kind of basic step that we buy into. That means that most of our techniques, methods and models are built around understanding worlds.

So when we work with a company, for example Adidas, that we work quite a lot with, for example a project on a running shoe, we try to reframe running as a ‘social phenomenon’ and map the ‘running world’ that consists of many things and many data points. One of them is the runner, but there are also others, like running groups, and running shops. There are symbols and there is history. There are artifacts, like clothing and shoes, and so on. All of these have to come into our analysis, as opposed to going out and only studying a runner. So that's the first methodology, to always start from understanding a world.

  The second level is more related to having what I would call ‘quality of data’. I don't think you can come up with a great idea without great data. Actually, I don't think that has ever happened in the world, and you need data even when you're just brainstorming. And data can be good or not as good. And I think when it comes to understanding people, the type of data that can unlock an opportunity is what we call rich data that comes from spending long time in the world you are exploring and getting all kinds of data, including the very small details.

A well-known American anthropologist Clifford Geertz talked about "thin worlds" and "thick worlds" and used the blink of an eye as an example. If you just look at the properties of the blink, it's basically muscle movement but there are many differences in how this blinking is felt and experienced. There are probably more than three million types of blinking. For example, a blink in a bar might have a certain meaning that’s totally different from the meaning of a blink on a street for a taxi driver. But it’s the same blink. So this contextual thick data can unlock the depth of the human nature and the meaning of things. And that data cannot be based on what people say, what they think, and what their perceptions are. It has to be based on first-person data, which could be observations, self-reporting, social connections you have, and the type of data is probably more video or films, photos, field-notes, literature, and words, language analysis, and things like that. At least for a while.

Many businesses struggle with capturing good quality data when they think “oh, all we have to do is just hire a bunch of anthropologists”, "all we have to do is just give people a video camera and now we can observe people", or “now, we just need a couple of engineers doing it”. And that is a completely wrong way to approach it. This will just disappoint everyone at the end, and that's the other side of the coin when this field has not really been defined yet and there's a lot of bad things going on, I think.

  The third thing is something we call nonlinear problem solving. Which would be, not only saying for example, okay people blink in this way and it means that. But understanding the patterns behind, something we call pattern recognition. It's basically a mix of analytics and creativity at the same time. So the way we do it is that we start without hypotheses and then use our hunch to form the hypotheses from the patterns in the data. We find it, and we validate it. Once we have validated it, we quantify it. So it's not that we only work with qualitative, we are very quantitative, but mostly in the later stages.

Nonlinear thinking is a bit like if you're a writer and you're writing a book. How do you find your story? Well it's not a completely linear process, and it's not a complete chaos. You're working in a pretty disciplined manner, but sometimes you guess, and sometimes you validate. And that's the method we try to use. It's really difficult. It's not brainstorming. It's so far from brainstorming that you couldn't imagine. It combines synthesis with analysis and has creation of something new in it.

What we're looking for is this one idea. So if you take a study we were hired to take; for example a study of the world of running, we're looking for the one idea, the one insight that can unlock that whole market – the one truth. I sometimes compare it to science, when I talk to scientists, they say that human sciences is not a science as such, and I say well "how did Darwin come up with the theory of evolution? Did he do it by posting hypothesis and then testing them doggedly? No he did not. He went out and studied animals.

That’s not so different from what we do. It's just that businesses have forgotten to discover. They don't discover anything anymore. When it comes to the basic methods or tools or frameworks we use – they are basically philosophical in a sense that they are based on a specific ontology and epistemology – which is being in the world as humans, and then understanding that world through rich data, and finally using non-linear problem-solving to put it all together.

    Ville: That makes a lot of sense. I really like the analogy between the fuzzy front end of the scientific method and the practice of helping businesses to form new hypotheses of the world and to discover opportunities for new value creation. But what should happen after you’ve captured your big idea? How businesses should start working with it and who should be involved? 

  Mikkel: We talk a lot about value creation, but I really think there's another concept there, which is value exploitation. Once you’ve had your big idea and created a business out of it, the question becomes how do you exploit the idea and then repeat that? It's not really about creating value anymore, but it’s simply how do you scale things out. I think that’s something that Danish companies are notoriously bad at, and probably Swedish companies are really good at, if I think IKEA as an example. In IKEA’s case, you can think what part of the business is currently about value creation, as the business would actually create something new, compared to value exploitation, and I would say the ratio is probably five percent / ninety-five percent. So actually in the long run a lot of value doesn’t come directly from value creation but from exploitation.   

  When we look at value creation within business, I would say the most important types of people are people who do stuff, such as engineers, scientists, and product people, among others. I think those are the most important value creators because without them you have nothing. For example, I went to a company that does audiovisual products like speakers and TVs, and they were really all into branding and this whole symbolic marketing world, and they talk about their consumers, and about the naming and all these things with social marketing, and so on. Then I met one guy, and he was an engineer, and he'd been working on a speaker for nine years where actually the sound waves fold around you, and he was so excited about it, and he showed me that, and it was a completely new way of thinking about sound. And I'm thinking, that guy, he’s a true value creator, and those other people are just symbol analysts, just like me, I'm just analyzing symbols, I'm not really creating anything as such. Symbol analysts are of course needed to make sense of the world, and I think both disciplines are needed. But at the moment it seems that the symbol analysts have taken over the world, and I'm a little skeptical about that. I believe that great companies are the companies that make quality products and I really think that the real heroes are the people who craft, the craftsmen.    

  So I think the biggest enemy of value creation is the idea that management is science or a discipline you can learn in a business school, and that management is about managing people. I think that's the biggest enemy because it creates a focus on things that don't really matter. Like how do we brand ourselves, or how do we segment our customers, or how should we be a matrix organization, or divisional organization. Like when the focus is too much on the internal part of the company. It’s not value creative. The same thing can be said about most branding people. The moment branding becomes a construction in itself; it's a bit like improvising over an improvisation. It becomes just words. And I don't believe that it's so valuable. But when these people work together, for example, if you make a guitar, and you have craftsmen or engineers that can actually change how a guitar works, and you have managers who know music and can lead you into this new world, and you have branding people who can put words, pictures and symbols around it; and when they all work together, that's truly great. 

    Ville: It sounds like companies should empower the ‘craftsmen’ and that the role of managers is to help them to do their thing and the role of the so-called symbol analysts is to help the ‘craftsmen’ to understand what to craft and eventually translate the outcomes into symbols and language that people listen.

  Mikkel: I agree, and that's a very good way of thinking that these symbol analysts are at their best when they are facilitating others and supporting others. So I agree on that one, but I would guess if you would just let the greatest engineers loose, they'll come up with stuff that they think is fine, such as mobile phones that you could take to shower, and so on. And that's not very value creative, and even worse, when the technologists take over a project, it sometimes just becomes new technology, just for the sake of it. You also must have seen a lot of that when working in the tech sector.

    Ville: To summarize, for me, the key takeaway is that the human and social sciences have something unique to offer for contemporary business that can’t necessarily be reduced under the disciplines of design or branding. That something seems to include the ability to help the companies to truly understand the world in a new way by capturing good quality data about people and their worlds and using the methods of nonlinear problem solving to help companies to discover, and finally to serve as a facilitator between the disciplines of design, business, marketing, engineering and others to make sure companies can create things and new worlds that are valuable for people. 

  Mikkel: A lot of what you say makes sense. I think we have to get a little bit out of the picture and set the stage for the right heroes. We also have to be very clear about what is that people like us can do. And I don't think it has been fully defined yet. We're trying it out with something we call client interaction models, asking when should we be there, and when we shouldn’t. Or when we are the heroes, and when others should be. Those are some of the practical questions we are looking for answers when charting the future value creation driven by human sciences. 

Graeber thinks there are three ways of talking about value: value as economic value that is created in exchange economy, value as a model for "meaning-making" and symbolic differentiation, and value as socially shared and culturally specific values and attitudes. The first definition is the most common in innovation literature, but I find the latter two more interesting as they open up new avenues for thinking about the topic.

Ville: Can you explain a bit more how symbolic differentiation works? 

Sakari: In the age of the global market – as Graeber and other writers in social theory, such as Jean Baudrillard, describe our current situation – “meaning-making" and symbolic differentiation are the arenas of marketing, branding and positioning, in which the focus is usually on identifying better ways to find and produce differences and try to influence people in the hope they'd prefer the differences you posses. 

The theories of marketing and branding emphasize the importance of the core brand message that a company has built through time and that is now explicated through its offering and activities. But companies are increasingly in trouble because their messages don't move people anymore, or in a more theoretical sense, they do not affect people and they are not desirable.

Ville: What would be the way forward for better and more valuable differentiation?

Sakari: It's evident that there's a need for a fresh approach for differentiation, as just being different is not enough. Difference in itself is negative – a differentiation. But one needs to think what is the basis of this difference, what is the real meaning of being different. This is the "positive" grounding for difference. What does the brand stand for? It can't just be "difference". One has to be more sensitive to qualitative and subtle contrasts of difference and become better at creating emotionally touching differences that tickle the customers. Ultimately, the aim is to better connect the stories that people live and that the brand wants to told.

Creating new value on the symbolic level means enabling people to experience that value, perhaps in relation to self-actualization or personal transformation. For example, when a person eats gourmet food, she becomes – at least for a while – a little finer person, or in a way, she becomes the food she has consumed. Being different and becoming different are always acts of separating oneself from something, but they are also always acts of connecting oneself to something and creating new associations, often through social relationships. 

Thus a great value proposition in itself is always a paradox, hinting at the contradiction between what the consumer is now and what she might become. Consumption is seen as the resolution of this paradox by acquiring the product or service. This is the core theory of symbolic value of consumption, and it is delicately analyzed for example by Jean Baudrillard already decades ago. 

Ville: What about social value, how is that different from economic value and systems of differentiation in your view?  

Sakari: The value that originates from social relationships and within cultural contexts doesn't necessarily revert back to economic value or symbolic differences in meaning. This is the area where people construct their identities through everyday actions in social interaction.

I believe value creation happens in practice in the context of social relationships. Value creation is an action, active happening – when two previously separate symbols or realms of value are connected together. These relationships don't have to be only between people, but they can be relationships between people and things, technologies and devices, or relationships between people and institutions. Sometimes the relationships can be only between connected things too. 

The main idea is to be able to create better and more meaningful relationships. In practice, if you are able to create a good ecosystem where the relationships are meaningful and charged with value, your business is likely to thrive too. 

Ville: The idea of objects facilitating the social relationship is something that we have seen debated a lot lately. What's your view on objects and their role in creating social value?

Sakari: Generally, I think most relationships are facilitated by social objects. Daniel Miller has been writing a lot about the topic in his book The Comfort of Things. In his view we are searching meaning from objects we have a relationship with. The role of all objects in our culture and our lives, to an extent, is to mediate different relationships on the levels of economic, social and symbolic value. Through objects we become part of the community and we dissociate ourselves from others. 

Ville: Can the objects be intangible, too?

Sakari: Yeah, I think objects can definitely be intangible too. If we think Bourdieu's habitus theory, value could be seen as education, habit or style, an abstract object with defined  boundaries. It all comes back to the skillful synthesis of cultural symbols. Similarly, a brand can be seen as an intangible object facilitating social relationships. After all, it is a collection of images, things and actions with a message and a mission.

Ville: To conclude, could you share us any best practices for better value creation? 

Sakari: Well, what we do daily is that we try to help our clients to bring together all these three aspects of value – the economical, the symbolic and the social. We do this by bringing the customer back to the center and by reminding companies how they ultimately exist for creating new customer value – as this is the only way the business can create economic value and succeed in the changing marketplace.