Interpreting and envisioning — A hermeneutic framework to look at radical innovation of meanings

The recent success of companies that compete through design has raised an interest on how to innovate the customer experience of a product or service. Even in industrial markets firms are increasingly moving beyond the improvement of functional performance, to address a deeper redefinition of the reason why their clients buy and use a product, what we call a “radical innovation of product meanings”. Whereas there is a wide body of literature about technological innovation, we still lack robust theoretical frameworks that explain how companies can successfully propose new experiences and new interpretations of what a product is meant for. The purpose of this article is to stimulate and support the development of studies on radical innovation of meaning by providing a new theoretical lens. We propose hermeneutics as a valuable perspective to investigate the radical innovation of product meanings. Differently than classic innovation theories, where innovation tends to be considered either as a process of problem solving or as a process of ideation, hermeneutics provides a framework to look at innovation as a process of interpreting (of developing meaningful scenarios rather than finding an optimal solution) and envisioning (of imagining experiences that are still not asked for, rather than answering to existing needs). We illustrate that, in this process, external networks have a central role as they feed a continuous debate about what is or is not meaningful. Hermeneutics, therefore, is useful to shed light on how external players may significantly affect the way a firm reframes its interpretation of the competitive context and gives meaning to things. The article is conceptual in nature, since it aims at providing a theoretical platform which other scholars may build on: the purpose is to provide an indication of a possible direction to spur a cumulative process of knowledge development, rather than a conclusion. Yet, we support our arguments for the use of hermeneutics in exploring the radical innovation of meaning with examples and cases from our preliminary analyses, mostly in the fields of robotics and healthcare.

► In a world full of technological opportunities competitive advantage comes from how firms make sense of these opportunities.
► Radical innovation of meaning is a significant change in the purpose of a product which often is more meaningful to clients.
► Innovating meanings is not a matter of problem solving (a better “how”), but of reinterpreting “why” clients use products.
► Hermeneutics provides a useful perspective to understand this process of radical reinterpretation.
► Radical reinterpretation hardly comes from clients, but rather by new external interpreters.