Vision and Innovation of Meaning - Hermeneutics and the search for technology epiphanies

Radical innovation strategies have traditionally been connected to either technology or market realted issues. The focus has been on solving problems and more recently on generating ideas. An alternative way to innovation is to search for a new meaningful experience of a product or technology. It includes an interpretation of the the human in a wider context and it links innovation to the fields of both design and hermeneutics. To discover technological applications with a radically new meaning (named technology epiphanies) this article propose four themes roted in the framework of hermeneutics: Designing scenarios of meaning, Debating, Building critical capabilites and Envisioning new meaning. These themes show why the creation of meanings is context-dependent and why they cannot be optimized. Moreover, we show that the search for new meanings includes a process of both questioning the existing beliefs in an industry but also to propose new market scenarios. By presenting cases both from business to business environments and consumer markets we conclude that the search for new meaningful products finds it way through the iterative process of interpreting and envisioning.