CHAPTER 1

MAPPING THE NEW WORLD

My passion for exploration and my attraction to the unknown have always been important drivers in my life. They have been imprinted into my DNA and have been constantly stimulated by context and experiences. Over the years, however, this way of interpreting the world around me has taken on an even greater relevance, becoming even more precious and indispensable. The reason for this is that our world is evolving at a pace that is more accelerated than ever. With a capacity for adaptation that is entirely unique to the human species, we can see every day how today’s great novelties become tomorrow’s routine. What we are now often taking for granted were yesterday’s dreams. We have all borne witness to this, whether more or less consciously: we are living through this metamorphosis in the way we buy things, communicate, eat, travel, and work.

The Metamorphosis of the World

At only a few years of age, our children—“digital natives”—learn how to use a tablet with the same natural spontaneity as they pick flowers or drink milk. During the COVID-19 crisis, millions of people, in every corner of the planet, became remote workers and virtual shoppers from one day to the next, when the day before, perhaps, they had no idea how to access a digital meeting or buy something online. In the era before social media, many industries had a very different face from the one we are used to today. Global city transport didn’t have to deal with Uber, and the hospitality sector didn’t have to face up to Airbnb. We are immersed in a world made up of incredible services, experiences, and products, from music streaming to digital photography, from electric cars to mobile phones, from social media to digital payments, from e-gaming to transportation apps. From the universe to the metaverse, we are all caught in a constant motion between the digital and the analog, the virtual and the real, the online and the off-line.

New ideas and new products are flooding the market: entering, evolving, disappearing or growing, and making their impact. Everything changes, at an unexpected rate of acceleration. And the only unchangeable constant is precisely this change itself. Transition is no longer a temporary state: it has become the norm. And whereas young people of years gone by dreamed of a stable job, perhaps in a renowned and prestigious company, in this evolving world, today’s youth dream of founding their own renowned and prestigious company. Or, at least, they aspire to establish a company that is renowned and prestigious enough to be acquired by another one, ideally a multinational corporation. We live in the era of the start-ups: big companies and global brands no longer compete against one another in a predictable and defined context.

The Democratization of Innovation

Our children will study this current era of profound change in schoolbooks. They will read about how this unique cocktail—equal parts globalization, digitalization, artificial intelligence, advanced technologies, and natural phenomena—threw new layers of color over the contemporary palette, provoking deep shifts in the portrait of the global society that we have all become used to.

This shift has impacted everything we do. And it has changed how every business displays itself, evolves, flourishes, or fails. If the world has experienced other revolutions in the past (such as the cognitive, agricultural, and industrial revolutions) and other crises (from world wars to historic pandemics), then the anomaly of the current situation is the extreme speed of the transition and its global nature.

We are bombarded by change every day, and we take it for granted, because at this point it’s just part of our lives. Some of these changes are obvious and visible. Others are less extreme. They are introduced to us day after day, in the most diverse range of situations, or we discover them on our own, during our own explorations of life’s many paths. New products and brands that are beautiful, intelligent, useful, poetic, and entertaining enter our lives daily, gently, today more than ever.

I have met thousands of such products over the years, like anyone else in this world. And many of these small and brilliant innovations have become part of my routine, adding some kind of value to my life. Sometimes it was a touch of additional comfort; sometimes it was a new form of convenience, style, security, practical utility, or sensual pleasure, according to the given object or service.

Some years ago, for example, I was walking through the streets of SoHo in Manhattan, not far from our PepsiCo Design Center, when at a certain point, without even realizing it, I found myself in front of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Design Store. I saw it and walked in, as I often do. I love this place; it has its own flavor of discovery and entertainment, of lightness and depth. Every object has been found, screened, and selected by people who possess a very particular sensitivity, passion, and admiration for art, design, and human intellect—something that seems to match somehow with my own way of thinking and feeling. Or at least this is what the sophisticated collection of objects makes me think of, reflecting the credibility of the institution, a place that is admired and respected by the entire creative community worldwide.

That afternoon, my attention was captured by an object on the opposite wall of the entrance, stacked up together with the others to create an interesting visual impact that could not and would not allow itself to go unobserved. I drew closer, and on first glance, I believed I was looking at nothing more than a book with a strange cover, made of a material that seemed similar to walnut. These books were left deliberately on the shelves, so that anyone might touch them and look through them. So I did. I took one of those books, and I tried to leaf through it. And something very surprising happened. The pages opened up, and a warm light emanated out toward my face. It wasn’t a book; it was a lamp! And it was called Lumio. Opening up the pages little by little, you could reveal a subtle, timid light, barely switched on. But the more you opened the book, the more light came out. You could expand the book all the way until the back cover touched the front; a magnet inserted into the structure of the lamp allowed the covers to be connected, creating a beam of light that would radiate 360 degrees. The lamp was wireless but could be recharged using an orange USB cable made of a material that looked like a small rope and could be mistaken for a bookmark. As a casual passerby, I was fascinated by the magic and beauty of the object; as a designer I was struck by how clever and intuitive it was.

Max Gunawan, the creative based in San Francisco who came up with the product, had managed to translate the mechanical and functional act of regulating the light intensity and direction of a lamp into a natural, warm, and human gesture, that of opening a book. I immediately bought two. Two “copies” of the same lamp! The wordplay alone intrigued me. I put one on my nightstand in my Manhattan apartment and another on a small table full of books in the living room of my house in the Hamptons, camouflaged among the dozens of tomes, ready to astonish my guests as only that object would be able to. Over the following years, I have bought others for friends and family. The lamp has been the perfect birthday gift. It has been an object of conversation for anyone visiting my home, a catalyst for comments and wonder. I have celebrated its features with countless people, and I continue to do so. If I were ever to leave my job as a designer, I could certainly become an excellent sales rep for Max.

Max’s Lumio is a perfect example of a simple, friendly product that makes its way into our homes in a gentle manner, adding a touch of poetry, style, and practicality into our daily lives. It remains a humble object; unlike products such as the mobile phone, radio, or television when they were invented, this lamp does not change your life. If, however, we start thinking about thousands of other products like the Lumio lamp, in a vast range of categories, then we can begin to understand how these useful and semi-anonymous solutions have an incredible collective power to raise the level of the emotional, aesthetic, and functional quality of our day-to-day experiences. I can think of dozens and dozens of objects of this kind that, in recent years, have come into my daily life, never to leave me again.

In a similarly casual way, but in quite different circumstances, I came across another product—a much better known one. I’m speaking about the virtual reality (VR) headset Oculus. One of my first interactions with this futuristic object happened some years back, for professional reasons, when we bought some models (in the Rift version) for our PepsiCo Design Center in New York. We were using them to design; to test out concepts with end users; and to share projects with clients, business partners, and even the media. I was already fascinated back then with the product’s potential, and over the years we have continued to use it in a consistent way, with great satisfaction. But my more intimate, daily use knowledge of Oculus is a more recent affair.

Just before drafting this book, a close friend shared with me a different version of these headsets: Oculus Quest. Stefan Sagmeister—a designer, an artist, and a thinker who has little need of further introduction—had arrived at my home in the Hamptons one Friday afternoon to pass a chill weekend together. On Saturday morning, while the majority of the guests were still in their rooms in gentle slumber, I looked out into the garden and saw him there with a visor over his eyes and two controllers in his hands, sweating profusely in the summer heat, running around like a madman, waving his arms and legs and his whole body, as if beating back invisible flies.

A few minutes later, I understood that Stefan had not gone crazy—thank God! He was simply working out in virtual reality, using an app called Supernatural that was projecting him into an incredible world, from enchanted scenes of the Blue Lagoon in Iceland to the peaks of Machu Picchu in Peru, from the waters of Raja Ampat in Indonesia to the terraces of Yuanyang in China. In those magical lands, he had to beat back spheres of energy rushing toward him, using two light sabers reminiscent of Star Wars, ducking and diving through radiant triangles, moving at the speed of light to face the different portals that would open up on his flanks from time to time. All of this movement was burning an average of 350 calories every fifteen minutes. What a great way to keep yourself fit on a daily basis with an activity that was also enjoyable. The gym of the future? Maybe. Or maybe not—but it certainly looked very fun.

I tried it out immediately, along with the architect Michel Rojkind, another enthusiastic friend who was sharing that beautiful weekend with us, and within a few minutes we were both rushing to buy it online. Over the following months, I discovered a whole range of other applications, from boxing to tennis, that transformed Oculus Quest into a daily routine for physical exercise, taking the place of other traditional workouts that had always bored me in one way or another. In this way, Oculus has become another one of those useful, functional, and pleasurable products, able to generate a form of positive impact in my life.

I could carry on with a whole series of other examples, but Lumio and Oculus should be more than sufficient to give an idea of what I’m talking about. Let’s pause for a moment to consider their real meaning. What do a lamp and a virtual reality headset have in common, aside from having been dreamed up, designed, and produced with a combination of functionality and style, creating useful, enjoyable innovation that adds value to my life every day? What makes these products special in this story that I’m telling you, aside from having names that, put together, have a sound and flavor reminiscent of fables, almost like the nicknames of the dwarfs in a modern Snow White story? Lumio and Oculus! Their common denominator, aside from my personal experiences and the fairy tale they remind me of, is in their origins, in that metaphorical womb that gave them the possibility of latching on when they were merely embryonic ideas in the busy imagination of visionary innovators, after which they found ways of growing, strengthening themselves, and coming into the world.

These products would never have existed without the internet; nor would they have existed if someone hadn’t invented the concept of crowdfunding. These objects were both born through an investment campaign on Kickstarter, a digital platform for collectively financing creative projects. Kickstarter was launched in July 2009 and over the years has helped raise billions of dollars to finance hundreds of thousands of projects. Lumio alone raised $580,000 in only thirty-one days following its launch. Oculus raised much more and has become one of the platform’s greatest successes. Palmer Freeman Luckey was only seventeen when he created his first prototype in 2010, in the garage of his parents’ house. The project was launched on Kickstarter two years later, in 2012, to clamorous success, raising around $2.5 million in a short space of time from more than ten thousand investors. In March 2014, when Oculus was still in its development stage, Facebook acquired it for $2 billion in cash and stock. Palmer was catapulted into the twenty-second place on the Forbes global list of the richest entrepreneurs under the age of forty, and Oculus became the benchmark in the world of virtual reality.

Kickstarter and the idea of crowdfunding have an important meaning in the current social and economic scenario. They are a clear and visible demonstration of the fact that it is easier than ever to access the capital necessary to develop a good idea and put it on the market, entering in competition, directly or indirectly, with existing products and services created over the years by consolidated brands and companies. My beloved Lumio and Oculus would never have existed without Kickstarter, which is the case with thousands of other objects, services, and software products launched on the platform since its creation and loved by individuals for the value these solutions have added to their lives. And that isn’t even to mention all the products that have been created outside of this platform, competing with those launched on Kickstarter itself, triggering an unavoidable process of collective progress and evolution, in an almost Darwinian way. The best solution survives and prevails. The best solution then produces others, exponentially, whether to support that solution or to compete with it, creating an expansive ecosystem in which new “best solutions” continually come to light and, over time, win out.

Kickstarter is just one example, proof of a much broader transformation. The global market, new manufacturing technologies, and digital platforms have made it possible for a vast number of dreamers and entrepreneurs to create their own new businesses, sometimes with extraordinary results. This shift has generated a proliferation of investment funds on the hunt for ideas, products, and enterprises to invest in, exponentially amplifying the level of financing allocated to the world of innovation, year after year.

Four Key Drivers That Are Changing the World

We are living in an era distinguished by a new and very clear opportunity, something that has never happened before: if you have a good idea today, in comparison with only a few years ago, it is much simpler to take it to market. The four fundamental drivers of this change can be summarized as follows:

In these four areas, until a few years ago, the established companies of the world were building their barriers to entry, constructed of scale of production, distribution, and communication. Today these barriers are crumbling away, eroded as never before by the winds of globalization, digitalization, and technology. Entrepreneurs with an innovative idea can potentially find investors in a relatively simple way, creating their own products at costs that are, on average, more competitive with respect to the past. These entrepreneurs can then leverage digital channels to both sell those products and communicate about them, directly reaching millions of people across the planet.

In this context, the most formidable barrier to entry that you can imagine and build to shield yourself from competition is no longer constructed by the brute force of money and scale. The greatest barrier you can have is one and only one: the relevance of your product for the end user—that is, your ability to create solutions, brands, spaces, services, and experiences that satisfy people’s needs and wants, and indeed the needs and wants of all society, in the most extraordinary way possible. For the first time ever, the creation of real value for people is beginning to align itself more and more with the creation of value for business, and this holds true for a vast range of products and industries. It is finally happening!

Looking at the broader picture in this way, we can begin to grasp the unique character of our historical moment and the epochal dimensions of the seismic shift taking place, entirely unprecedented in the world of global business. All of this is possible for the first time in the history of humanity.

Incremental Innovation Is No Longer Enough

Over recent years, this evolving scenario has created new dynamics and expectations. Large companies—especially in the consumer world—are going through a moment of general strategic crisis, trying to understand how to generate a culture of innovation that, in many cases, they haven’t practiced for decades and that they are now attempting to comprehend and then put in motion in an accelerated and meaningful way. What many of these enterprises used to call innovation often describes little more than the incremental evolution of their products: marginal changes to the same formulas, incremental functional modifications, minimal formal restyling.

In some industries, such as the automotive industry or consumer electronics, the majority of innovation has historically been marked by the linear progress of technology—less weight, longer life, more comfort, higher resolution, wider dimensions, smaller size, extended autonomy. Not much more happened in the way of innovation unless an anomalous and unexpected force entered the market and changed all the rules of the game: from Motorola’s invention of the cell phone, to the constant disruptive innovations of Apple in Steve Jobs’s years there, all the way to Elon Musk’s Tesla, an electric vehicle at scale, to name a few. But these are exceptions. For most of the product categories we interact with on a daily basis, innovation continues to be incremental. And when big companies succeed in producing breakthrough innovations, they often come about through mergers and acquisitions, investments in external enterprises, joint ventures, or acquisition of patents.

This incremental approach to innovation is easy to explain: radical change is risky. And radical change at the scale of a multinational corporation can be extremely risky. In contrast, lack of change is efficient and profitable when the pressure of competition is contained. And the bigger the scale, the higher the efficiency and the profitability of this lack of change.

Although there are always exceptions to the rule, this was the practice for decades in many modern industries and especially in the consumer business. But the situation today is different. For the first time in their history, large multinational corporations have to compete with a plethora of new entrants who, leveraging the opportunities offered by the new scenario, are finding ways to create innovative products that stand out—and to bring them to market.

The formula for these enterprises is clear and as simple to understand as it is complicated to imitate: putting people at the center of everything, independent entrepreneurs in every corner of the globe—often young people in their parents’ garages or new graduates in studio flats—analyze every product and industry, trying to figure out every frustration, desire, dream, and need that has not been resolved or dealt with by the available market solutions. Once these gaps have been identified, new products, services, brands, and experiences are imagined that can resolve the problems identified.

The big difference from the past, however, is that today these ideas can actually be realized and launched with far greater ease. With the historical barriers to entry of the traditional companies worn away by globalization, digitalization, and technology, the new entrants can leap over those barriers with more agility, arriving directly at the end user with meaningful proposals, while combining functionality and aesthetics, rationality and emotions. The different structure, low fixed costs, flexible culture, different financial expectations, and different legal pressures on these entities mean that they can avoid many of the rigid limitations imposed on—or self-imposed by—the large corporations. If you work in a business-to-consumer industry and your sector has still not been impacted by this revolution, it is simply a matter of time. You cannot avoid this risk—or, if you will, this opportunity (it depends on your point of view).

The situation, yet again, leaves us with only one choice: to create extraordinary solutions for the end user, without compromising. If you don’t create something special for them, if you don’t realize authentic, unique, and relevant solutions for their needs and wants, someone else will come onto the scene sooner or later and do so in your place. And then you will find yourself in the uncomfortable position of chasing behind them—if you’re lucky. If you’re less fortunate, then you will lose your market, as has happened in recent years to brands such as Kodak, Blockbuster, Toys “R” Us, and Sears, to name but a few.

Today’s companies need to focus their efforts more than ever on the production of meaning, creating an ecosystem of products that make sense to people and provide them with that meaning in every moment of interaction with the brand. We are entering a new phase of human history in which there is no choice but to generate excellence from every standpoint, from the product to the brand, from the service to the experience, from storytelling to arriving at that full network of enablers and amplifiers that support the very existence of a product (logistics, production, business modeling). There is no longer any room to protect solutions that aren’t human-centered—in other words, solutions that do not satisfy the needs and desires of users, articulated or otherwise.

The Age of Excellence

We are entering a new modern renaissance, fueled by the reborn, humanistic necessity of putting people at the center of everything. Technology is an enabling asset, the brand and distribution are the amplifiers, but the excellence of the product, put at the service of human beings, is the fundamental variable for success. It will no longer be possible to win in the marketplace simply with the brute power of impermeable technological patents, inaccessible large-scale distribution networks, or multibillion communication budgets that others cannot match.

Paradoxically, in the era of technology’s utmost triumph, we are also living through the utmost celebration of the person. In the era of e-commerce, social media, 3D printing, and start-ups, we are living through the democratization of innovation, to the individual’s ultimate advantage. In this hypertechnological, hyperconnected, digital world, there will be increasingly less space for mediocrity, step by step. Companies that know how to adapt to this model will survive, prosper, and win out. Those that do not adapt will be destined to a gradual but unavoidable extinction. The most positive consequence of the whole situation is that it will have an incredibly beneficial impact on the society of the future. The best products, the best brands, the best services, the best experiences will prevail. The human being will enjoy this. We are entering the “age of excellence.”