Contribution Design: How Does Innovation Strengthen Relationships?
Changing our focus from What to Who
As humans, we tend to see technology as a thing.
The wheel.
The steam engine.
The iPhone.
The generative AI.
But investors know that the invention is not the innovation. At the earliest stages of investment, the core criteria are Team and TAM.
Team = the signaling pedigree of a founder, their entrepreneurial energy and exuberance to iterate through complex challenges, augmented by a computer science degree from a top university, and prior successful startup experience with a known brand.
TAM = the total addressable market, signaling the size of ambition and potential to earn multiple billions.
Technology is created within a complex adaptive human-technical system, led by people who overcome existing system inertia to change how we are organized.
The wheel was used on carts. The wheel was also used to mechanize agriculture, such as animal traction and crop irrigation; and craft industries, such as windmills, which are powered by centrifugal force, and divide up society into new hierarchies.
The steam engine powered trains. The steam engine also powered machines in factories and dense urbanization, changing the structure of society to create a new middle class, but also pollution, dense, rapidly growing cities, and global colonial trade.
The iPhone was used to send emails with a finger-based interface. The iPhone also houses Apple's App Store, which allows us to bank and log health data and stream media and use social media, but also teens’ use of social media is correlated to anxiety and poor mental health.
The generative AI is helping people write job cover letters, and form synthetic and dangerous suicidal ideation chat responses to humans.
Each time these inventions were unleashed, humans believe that they were changing the status quo into a preferred future.
“To design is to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”
- Herbert Simon.
Indeed. Simon had a bias towards action. But who gets to determine which courses of action are promising, and which situations are preferred?
If you consider these questions, the emphasis shifts from WHAT we create to WHO creates, who decides, who pays, and who is the recipient of the consequences of innovation.
Who gets to imagine?
Who gets to create?
Who gets to decide which social-technical systems get funding?
Who gets to turn existing conditions into preferred situations?
Who gets to pay for the social-technical system as the customer?
Who else gets to benefit from the social-technical system?
Who gets to suffer the unintended consequences of the social-technical system?
Who gets to own the fruits of innovative social-technical systems?
If we go back to the early stage criteria of an active angel investor or Venture Capitalist, we can shift our focus from WHAT they are funding to WHO gets to fund, and who receives those funds.
WHO gets to fund? Many folks from Stanford, and Harvard.
WHO gets the funding? More than 80% still goes to white male founding teams.
WHO gets substantially less funding relative to their share of the population: Black founders. Latino founders. Women, and women on teams with men.
To change the monoculture of social fabric-disrupting inventions that aren’t yet fully considered social-technical systems, we need to create paths to innovation capital that generate multiple perspectives on the future.
Throughout the methods of design or engineering or decision-making in the creation, funding, and scaling processes of social-technical system building, ask not WHAT. But WHO.
I call this Contribution Design, distinctly different from the type of work I’ve done all of my career in Product Design or Business Model Design. Design and Redesign the methods, governance processes, and decision pathways for who gets to imagine, who gets to decide, and who gets the money.
Throughout the funding process for the earliest stages of innovation, ask not WHAT, but WHO.
With one key question to evaluate the benefit of innovation efforts:
Whose relationships are strengthened by this social-technical system?