Alexander Manu’s The Imagination Challenge (written in 2005-2006 and released in January 2007) did just that—offering not predictions, but provocations, laying out a future in which imagination would become the critical infrastructure of innovation, foresight, and economic value. Eighteen years later, we can now revisit Manu’s propositions not as speculative thought, but as foundational foresight. In this retrospective, we trace the ideas that have since materialized, now woven into the strategic DNA of organizations, technologies, and economies worldwide.

1. Imagination as Infrastructure
Long before the term “design thinking” was naturalized into boardroom vernacular, Manu made the case that imagination—not creativity, not productivity—was the cornerstone of innovation. This was not imagination as artistry, but as strategic capacity. A means to prototype futures, not merely products.

Today, speculative design, scenario planning, and foresight exercises have become fixtures in global organizations. Imaginative thinking is no longer an optional flourish—it is a condition of resilience.

2. Behaviour Before Technology
Manu insisted that technology is a trailing indicator—that what drives invention is not the engineering impulse, but the behavioural desire. In other words: technology follows behaviour. This inversion of the classic narrative has since become a dominant principle in the development of user-centric platforms, predictive algorithms, and behavioural economics.
From the architecture of streaming platforms to the behavioural design of mobile
ecosystems, the invisible hand shaping digital culture is human intent—captured, modelled, and monetized.

3. Strategic Imagination and the Design of Futures
One of Manu’s more enduring contributions is the “Strategic Imagination Circle” (in subsequent works updated and renamed the "Foresight Innovation Cycle"—a framework that formalized imagination as a methodological tool in business. Here, imagination is not escapist; it is pragmatic. It is used to map disruptions before they unfold, to chart opportunities before they become evident.

This logic is now visible in the proliferation of foresight labs, future scenario workshops, and anticipatory governance models across sectors—from urban design to artificial intelligence.

4. The Logic of Play as Strategic Discovery
Play, for Manu, was not recreational—it was epistemological. He argued that play was a mechanism by which new knowledge is discovered, new pathways revealed. Today, this is echoed in the wide embrace of gamification, simulation, and sandboxing across innovation processes.

Far from trivial, “play” has become a deliberate methodology—one that reframes constraints as catalysts and opens the door to serendipitous breakthroughs.

Technology, Economy, and the Materialization of the Intangible
While The Imagination Challenge was not framed as a work of technological prophecy, its insights have proven profoundly prescient in capturing the architecture of the digital economy that would follow.

1. Behavioural Data as Economic Capital
In a move that anticipated the datafication of society, Manu asserted that value would shift from products to behaviours. In this logic, behaviours become assets—tracked, modelled, and leveraged.

The predictive architectures of today’s platforms (Google, Meta, Amazon) operate precisely within this paradigm. Clicks, searches, habits—they are the raw materials of economic production in a post-material economy.

2. From Ownership to Experience
Manu forecasted a shift from product economies to experience economies. Value, he argued, would migrate from the object to the orchestration—from what is owned to what is felt, perceived, shared. Streaming, subscription models, algorithmic curation, digital nomadism—these are the artifacts of an experiential economy that has largely replaced possession with access.

3. Anticipatory Design and Predictive Systems
Perhaps most presciently, Manu identified the emergence of anticipatory systems—those that act before the user acts, fulfilling needs before they are fully articulated. In today’s landscape, this logic powers everything from AI recommendation engines to automated logistics and anticipatory healthcare. The future, once a speculative domain, has become a programmable variable—foreseen, forecasted, and, increasingly, fabricated.

4. The Dematerialization of Value
Manu proposed that the physical form of a product would increasingly become secondary to its informational and algorithmic scaffolding. This has proven true across sectors—from SaaS platforms to fintech, where software and service outpace substance and surface.

Uber, Salesforce, TikTok: these entities operate with minimal tangible inventory, yet generate exponential value through behavioural orchestration and data refinement.

5. Attention and Intention as the New Currency
Finally, Manu recognized that the most valuable resource would not be oil, data, or capital—but attention and intention. In today’s algorithmic economy, these elements are not just captured—they are cultivated and commodified.

Social media, targeted ads, behaviourally responsive content—these do not merely reflect what users want; they shape what users want next.

A Living Forecast
The Imagination Challenge was never a crystal ball—it was a calibration tool. It sharpened our perception of latent shifts, offering frameworks rather than forecasts. Today, those frameworks feel less like theory and more like operating systems for the digital age and also an invitation: to treat imagination not as a departure from reality, but as a way of revealing its latent directions.

Published in 1995, ToolToys: Tools with an Element of Play was not just a book about product design—it was a provocation. It questioned the very utility of utility, asserting that true value lies not in what an object does, but in what it invites. It invited designers to look beyond function, to consider the emotional, experiential, and even spiritual dimensions of interaction.

This was a radical proposition at the time. The industrial design canon was still dominated by efficiency, minimalism, and optimization. Manu’s intervention was to introduce a third axis: play—not as ornament or indulgence, but as a cognitive and emotional necessity.

1. ToolToys: A Compound Philosophy of Engagement
In the book, a “ToolToy” is more than a hybrid between toy and tool. It is an epistemological shift. The “tool” represents function and necessity; the “toy,” imagination and affect. When fused, the result is not just an object—but a possibility. An invitation to co-create meaning.
This framing anticipated the current surge in affective design, emotional UX, and user experience as a metric of value. It was an early articulation of design as relational process—a dialogue between object and user, not a monologue of instruction.

2. Designing for Relationships, Not Just Results
ToolToys reframed design as a medium for relationship-building. What matters is not what the object is, but what it becomes in interaction. This sensibility has since permeated design thinking, human-centred design, and the broader evolution of experience design.
Where once we asked “what does it do?”, we now ask:

• How does it make me feel?
• What does it let me imagine?
• Who do I become when I engage with it?

3. Global Dissemination: From Theory to Exhibition
The conceptual power of ToolToys was not confined to print. Between 1996 and 2001, the book served as the intellectual backbone for a series of international exhibitions curated by the author and realized in collaboration with designer Mikael Fuhr.

These exhibitions brought the ToolToy philosophy into tangible form—inviting audiences across Denmark (Copenhagen 1996 and 2001), Norway, Venezuela, Spain (Bilbao, Ciudad Real and Barcelona), and Germany, to experience the convergence of function and play. Notable venues included the Danish Design Center in Copenhagen and the Museo Miro in Barcelona, both hosting explorations into how objects could provoke wonder, curiosity, and delight, without sacrificing purpose.

The exhibitions became pedagogical in nature—educating designers, students, and professionals alike in the value of emotional resonance, cognitive invitation, and playful utility.

4. Legacy: From Object to Interface
In many ways, ToolToys was a prelude to what would later be known as experience design, gameful interaction, and narrative UX. Its principles now echo across:

• The tactile immediacy of digital devices
• The intentional friction of interactive installations
• The behaviour-shaping logic of gamified systems
• The character and charm of apps that ‘feel alive’

In a world increasingly mediated by screens and sensors, the ToolToy framework offers an enduring reminder: that the soul of design lies not in perfection, but in engagement.

A Living Archive of Design Possibility
As we look back on ToolToys, we do not encounter an obsolete theory, but a still-evolving framework—one that continues to challenge the boundaries between utility and delight, instruction and invitation. It is not simply a book from the past; it is a lens for the present.

Alexander Manu’s The Philosophy of Disruption (2022) is not merely a treatise on innovation or technological change; it is a methodical reframing of disruption as a generative act of knowledge creation. Positioned at the intersection of foresight, strategy, and human transformation, the book challenges prevailing narratives that treat disruption as episodic or accidental. Instead, Manu constructs a cohesive philosophical framework that redefines disruption as an evolutionary condition of human systems—cultural, technological, institutional, and existential.

What distinguishes this work is its intellectual ambition. Manu’s disruption is not a business buzzword but a hermeneutic device—a way of reading and reinterpreting the world. In this framing, transformation is not the outcome of disruption; rather, disruption is the ontological precondition for any meaningful transformation. It destabilizes the familiar and opens cognitive space for new meaning to emerge.

At its core, The Philosophy of Disruption proposes that transformation does not begin with technology, but with epistemology: how we know, what we accept as true, and which futures we are willing to imagine. This is evident in Manu’s articulation of “disruptive knowledge”—a synthesis of tacit and explicit ways of knowing that is both embodied and analytical. He positions this synthesis as essential for navigating uncertainty and reframing the value systems that underpin organizational and societal behaviour.

Equally powerful is the book’s insistence on foresight as a practice of intentionality. Disruption, in Manu’s view, demands not just reaction, but reason. This is where the originality of the work becomes clearest: Manu’s disruption is not chaotic, but contemplative. He introduces the notion of “the contemplative interval”—a temporal and cognitive space in which individuals and institutions must learn to unlearn—to question the foundational assumptions that bind them to outdated models of value, success, and identity.

The philosophical resonance of this work also lies in its ethical commitment. In highlighting the role of self-concept, Manu confronts the psychological inertia that often prevents meaningful change. Disruption, he argues, is an invitation to revisit and reconfigure the self. It is a call to reimagine not only the systems we inhabit, but the identities we perform within them.

What makes The Philosophy of Disruption especially timely is its critique of reactive paradigms in business and governance. Instead of preparing for “what’s next,” Manu invites leaders to shape “what ought to be.” He situates disruption within a broader continuum of knowledge production, social justice, and design ethics, urging a move from linear planning to emergent strategy.

Since its publication, the book has gained notable international traction across design institutions, innovation consultancies, and policy think tanks. Its frameworks are now part of postgraduate curricula in strategic foresight and behavioural economics, and it has been adopted by design and leadership programs in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. In particular, the Disruption Index and Transformation Cycle have become foundational tools in helping public and private sector leaders navigate volatility with agency and intent. What began as a philosophical provocation has rapidly matured into a global methodology for rethinking leadership in uncertain times.

This work is a companion piece to The Imagination Challenge, yet it transcends the scope of its predecessor by offering not just a roadmap for creative innovation, but a lens for understanding the ontological shifts necessary for systemic transformation. Where The Imagination Challenge called for creative adaptation, The Philosophy of Disruption demands existential recalibration.

In a time when disruption is both fetishized and feared, Manu provides a lucid, profound, and necessary reframing. His contribution is not a toolkit, but a new grammar of thought—one that equips readers not only to navigate disruption, but to become the authors of transformational futures.

Alexander Manu’s Transcending Imagination: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Creativity (2024) offers a timely and radically insightful intervention into the discourse surrounding creativity, technology, and design. Far from presenting artificial intelligence as a mere productivity tool or a computational novelty, Manu reframes AI as a profound co-agent in the evolutionary journey of human creativity. This book does not ask how AI can replicate art, but rather how human imagination can expand in the presence of intelligent systems—and in doing so, it proposes a new creative archetype altogether.

From Archetype to Intent: A Shift in Creative Foundations

The originality of the work lies not in its celebration of AI’s capabilities, but in its challenge to the foundational categories through which creativity has traditionally been understood. Central to the book is the reorientation from archetype to intent—a philosophical and pedagogical provocation. In doing so, Manu moves the reader beyond the iterative refinement of inherited forms toward the generative possibilities of form unbound by legacy. The call is clear: creativity in the age of AI is no longer about perfecting what is known but imagining what was previously unimaginable.
Manu builds a language for this paradigm shift. Concepts such as "incidental beauty," "AI as accomplice," and "intentional articulation" are not mere rhetorical flourishes—they are methodological instruments that reframe how creators engage with design, narrative, and cultural production. Rather than reinforcing a binary between the human and the artificial, Manu reveals how this very distinction collapses under the weight of collaboration. The creative act becomes distributed; cognition and authorship are shared; originality is no longer individual, but ecological.

Global Reach and Applied Relevance

Since its publication, Transcending Imagination has resonated globally with practitioners across creative industries, academic institutions, and innovation networks. The book has been adopted as a key text in advanced design curricula across North America, Europe, and East Asia. Its frameworks are now central to workshops in speculative design, AI-augmented creativity, and narrative systems thinking. Particularly influential has been its exploration of “the narrated economy,” a concept that invites business leaders and strategists to view innovation not as product output but as cultural narrative—a shift that has informed brand storytelling and digital strategy practices in major design consultancies and tech firms.

Intent-Centred Design and the Future of Creative Education

Manu’s emphasis on intent—rather than output—has also found traction in educational reform. Design educators have drawn from the book’s insights to push beyond user-centred design and toward intent-centred design, where the role of the designer becomes more exploratory, less prescriptive. In doing so, students are encouraged to articulate creative purpose as a philosophical stance, not merely a functional requirement
The contemporary acceleration of generative technologies amplifies the relevance of Transcending Imagination. As tools like MidJourney, DALL·E, and ChatGPT increasingly populate the creative landscape, the questions posed in this book acquire urgent currency. What does it mean to be a narrator in a co-created world? What constitutes authorship in a context where intention is parsed by machines? How might we evaluate beauty, innovation, or cultural value when the expressive medium is no longer exclusively human?

A Manifesto for the Future of Meaning-Making

In its intellectual and aesthetic ambitions, Transcending Imagination builds on the philosophical foundations laid in The Philosophy of Disruption and The Imagination Challenge but ventures further. It imagines not merely the future of work, design, or education but the future of human meaning-making. At a time when creativity is being redefined by algorithmic collaboration, Manu offers a lucid and inspiring manifesto: creativity is not threatened by artificial intelligence—it is enriched by it, magnified, and potentially transcended by it.
This is a book not of prescriptions, but provocations. It asks professionals and scholars alike to rethink the source of their creative energy and to reimagine the landscapes in which imagination unfolds. For those tasked with designing futures—whether in business, education, or art—Transcending Imagination is essential reading: not only for its insights, but for its invitation to rethink what it means to be creative in a world we no longer build alone.

Dynamic Future-Proofing: Integrating Disruption in Everyday Business (2021) emerges as one of Alexander Manu’s most operationally grounded and systemically far-reaching contributions. Where his previous works laid the philosophical scaffolding for understanding creativity and disruption, this book translates those foundational concepts into a coherent methodology for action. Here, the future is not a speculative horizon but an architectural material—something to be shaped, coded, and deployed with intentional precision.

At the heart of this approach is the AIM Methodology: Amplification, Impact Intensification, and Market Maximization—a tripartite model for interpreting and responding to the disruptive vectors of technological and behavioural transformation. This framework offers not only clarity, but also an executable structure for leaders, planners, and strategists navigating conditions of deep volatility.

What distinguishes this text is its unwavering focus on disruption as a behavioural event, not merely a technological one. Manu argues compellingly that no invention disrupts until it is lived—until it is integrated into everyday behaviours that redefine collective expectations and social norms. In this view, business transformation is downstream of human transformation. This recalibration from systems to selves is the originality of the work.

What Was Understood, and Understood Correctly
This book assumes—and rewards—a reader who sees the limitations of conventional strategy. It resonates most strongly with those who intuit that traditional business foresight often operates on borrowed time. The reader who grasps that disruption is not an interruption but a continuum of behavioural adoption is already aligned with the book’s epistemic pivot.

Manu understood rightly that future-proofing is not an exercise in anticipation but one of composition: designing new capacities for awareness, adaptation, and strategic re-alignment at every level of the organization. He also affirmed the subtle, yet urgent, distinction between recognizing change and being retooled for it. This is not a text for those merely seeking competitive advantage; it is for those willing to re-author the very conditions under which advantage can be imagined and made durable.

The Architecture of Originality
Three dimensions of the book’s originality deserve emphasis:

1. TSNS Framework (Tools, Shells, Networks, Settlements):
2. This conceptual lens translates civilizational progress into an intelligible map of disruption. It reframes human environments—both physical and immaterial—as evolving systems of integration, where tools do not simply serve needs but create new social architectures of possibility.
3. Future-Proofing as a Behavioural Ethic:
4. Rather than equating readiness with technological capacity, Manu places curiosity, awareness, and will at the centre of organizational resilience. This ethical reorientation is not auxiliary—it is primary. The integration of disruption becomes a measure of how deeply an organization can nurture exploratory thinking across its culture.
5. Re-tooling the Individual:
6. In a moment where automation increasingly offloads routine tasks, Manu declares that the most urgent innovation frontier is the human being. The book elevates the individual not as an executor of systems but as the new locus of innovation. This insight anchors a profound shift in organizational strategy: human potential becomes the infrastructure of the future.

Global Impact and Strategic Uptake
Since its publication, Dynamic Future-Proofing has found its way into executive training programs, innovation hubs, and foresight frameworks across sectors. It has been adopted by forward-thinking business schools, used in strategic design programs in Europe and South America, and integrated into public policy foresight labs. Its language of disruption—once reserved for niche innovation circles—is increasingly shaping boardroom vocabulary, particularly around strategic agility, scenario design, and adaptive leadership.

The book’s emphasis on scenario testing and behaviour-driven planning has resonated particularly in sectors grappling with accelerated digitalization, such as healthcare, finance, and education. Leaders are drawing upon its frameworks not only to react to change but to choreograph it—transforming reactive models of strategic planning into proactive architectures of value creation.

Enduring Relevance
As we move further into the 2020s—a decade defined not by stability but by systemic flux—the insights of Dynamic Future-Proofing remain acutely relevant. In an age when organizations can no longer rely on precedent or linear forecasting, Manu offers a language and methodology for navigating futures that are already underway.

It is a call not merely to prepare for disruption, but to integrate it into the daily grammar of strategic thought. For professionals, academics, and decision-makers tasked with shaping institutions in conditions of constant transformation, this book is both guide and generator—a living framework for building futures that matter.

The Possibility of Designing from the Present
With Transforming Organizations for the Subscription Economy (2017), Alexander Manu did not simply anticipate a shift in business models—he initiated a reframing of what it means to design an enterprise in an era of behavioural transformation. This work departs from the worn trajectories of adaptation and incremental innovation, proposing instead that organizations must be built from scratch, designed not on the inherited logic of legacy systems but on the latent potential of the contemporary condition.
This is not a book about market shifts; it is a philosophical realignment of organizational purpose. Its originality stems from its core question: If one were to design their organization today, without the inertia of the past, what would they build? Manu’s answer is neither prescriptive nor purely speculative. It is a framework grounded in the recognition that technology does not disrupt until it transforms behaviour—that transformation is not a change in circumstance, but a reconstitution of structure, relationship, and meaning.

What Manu Got Right
Manu correctly diagnosed the primacy of behaviour in economic and social transformation. Years before the explosion of platform economies and ubiquitous subscription models, he forecast the collapse of product-centric transactions in favour of experience orchestration. He identified that the economy was not becoming digital; it was becoming behavioural. This is not a trivial distinction. The behavioural economy he describes is characterized by a shift in value creation—from transactional efficiency to emotional resonance, from product delivery to participatory engagement.
Moreover, he captured the ascendance of the intrinsically motivated user. In a world where platforms like Instagram, Uber, and Pinterest mediate value through interaction rather than ownership, Manu’s insight that “value delivery becomes the value proposition” is prescient and profound. He recognized that in the subscription economy, organizations no longer sell things—they choreograph moments, interactions, and relationships. The user is not a recipient of value, but its generator.

A New Aesthetic of Business
Perhaps the most radical proposition within the book is that business must become art. In an environment where customer service, digital interfaces, and brand ecosystems are judged by their emotional and aesthetic merit, Manu repositions the corporation as a medium of cultural production. This is more than metaphor. It is a call for businesses to cultivate a sensibility—what he calls the artistic merit of value experience. The organization becomes a platform for aesthetic engagement, for the transmission of feeling, of meaning, of shared identity.

To operate in the subscription economy, businesses must unlearn the managerial logic of scarcity and control, and relearn the performative logic of interaction and presence. This requires a reconception of infrastructure—not as fixed assets, but as platforms of becoming, wherein data, design, and desire converge.

Impact and Currency Since Publication
Since its release, Transforming Organizations for the Subscription Economy has served as both a strategic guide and a philosophical foundation for business leaders, design thinkers, and public innovators across continents. It has influenced business model redesign in technology startups, informed transformation agendas in legacy sectors, and entered MBA and innovation curriculum in North America and Europe. It is often cited in discussions of platform strategy and value co-creation, especially within creative economy and service innovation circles.
The book’s predictive resonance has only grown. In the post-pandemic context, where everything from fitness to grocery to mental health care has moved to subscription-based and platform-mediated models, Manu’s framing has proven uncannily accurate. Concepts such as "life subscribed," "everything as a service," and "experience as the economy" are no longer provocative hypotheses—they are operational realities for millions.

A Lasting Strategic Contribution
What endures in Transforming Organizations is its insistence that the future cannot be extrapolated from the past. To engage with this future, one must not only reengineer systems, but reimagine selves. The text is an invitation to strategic imagination—to see the business not as an entity constrained by precedent, but as a canvas for new narratives of human experience. This future is built not with legacy tools but with the ingredients of the present.

For professionals, scholars, and leaders tasked with shaping resilient, participatory, and meaningful institutions, this work remains indispensable. It reminds us that transformation begins with the audacity to imagine what does not yet exist—and the discipline to begin building it now.

The Book that Prefigured a Paradigm Shift

Published in 2015, Value Creation and the Internet of Things is among Alexander Manu’s most foundational and anticipatory works—a blueprint for understanding the emergence of a new economic logic: one not built on products or ownership, but on participation, behaviour, and meaning. Far from being a treatise on connected devices or digital infrastructure, the book proposes a radical reframing: that in the age of the Internet of Things (IoT), behaviour itself becomes the central medium of economic value.

At a time when the IoT was still largely treated as a technical infrastructure challenge, Manu recognized its deeper implications. He argued that connectivity alone does not create value. What creates value is the new behaviour connectivity enables, the new desires it evokes, and the new meanings it makes possible. In this sense, the book moved the IoT discussion from engineering to anthropology, from interface to ideology.

What Manu Got Right
Manu correctly identified that the transformation ushered in by the IoT would not be technological, but behavioural and existential. His central thesis—that “technology is never what is monetized; it is behaviour that is monetized”—has only become more relevant with time. The meteoric rise of platforms like TikTok, Uber, and smart home ecosystems has vindicated this claim. These systems do not merely serve users; they elicit performances—of self, of presence, of identity—that constitute the core of their economic logic.
Another prescient insight was his framing of value as a subjective, temporal, and dynamic construct. Manu illustrated how traditional models of extrinsic value (features, price, utility) are giving way to intrinsic models (meaning, presence, participation). He offered a vocabulary for this shift: value moments, retrieved behaviours, perceptive fields, apperception, and intrinsic motivation—concepts that continue to underpin emerging theories in behavioural economics, user experience design, and digital strategy.

The Originality of the Work
The originality of Value Creation and the Internet of Things lies in its synthesis of economics, psychology, and philosophy into a new grammar for value. It abandons the industrial language of products and processes and replaces it with a behavioural language of platforms, participation, and presence. In this framing:

• The economy becomes a space for being, not simply for having.
• Enterprises become behavior platforms, not product producers.
• Value is not delivered—it is co-created through meaningful engagement.

Manu’s analogy of Google Earth, transitioning from globe to platform to participation network, exemplifies this shift. He shows that strategic value is not the expansion of experience—it is its redefinition. This philosophical lens sets his work apart from purely technical or managerial perspectives.

Impact and Uptake Since Publication
Since its release, the book has gained traction across academic and applied domains. It has influenced curricula in design schools, foresight programs, and innovation labs, particularly in Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia. Strategic consultants and design thinkers have incorporated its frameworks—especially those around intrinsic motivation, retrieved behaviour, and value ecosystems—into organizational transformation initiatives.
The text's influence is evident in its alignment with now-mainstream discussions about experience ecosystems, human-centred AI, digital twins, and data-as-infrastructure. In smart city design, IoT strategy, and platform development, Manu’s foresight-driven perspective is increasingly seen as essential.
Indeed, many of the behavioural questions he posed a decade ago—“What do objects want to know?” “What do places want to tell us?”—have become foundational in ambient computing and service design disciplines.

Relevance in the Present Moment
The ideas advanced in Value Creation and the Internet of Things are arguably more relevant now than at the time of publication. As AI-infused systems, sensor networks, and real-time data platforms shape daily life, value has become inseparable from participation. In this reality, users are not consumers; they are performers in an economy of constant expression.
What Manu anticipated is the cultural logic of this future: where value lies not in ownership but in expressive immediacy, where the self is projected, measured, and reconstituted in digital spaces. The book offers not a roadmap, but an ideological lens—a way of seeing that remains indispensable for leaders, educators, designers, and strategists aiming to build meaningful futures.

Value Creation and the Internet of Things is a call to shift the strategic question from "What can we build?" to "What behaviours can we make possible?" In doing so, it equips readers not only to survive technological change but to redefine what change means—through the imagination, the self, and the structures of value we choose to create.

Reframing Innovation through Behaviour
In Behaviour Space: Play, Pleasure and Discovery as a Model for Business Value (2012) Alexander Manu reframes the very purpose of business—from the delivery of products to the orchestration of human behaviour. He does not describe innovation as a technical feat or a productivity gain; rather, he presents it as an invitation to play, a strategic engagement with desire, transformation, and meaning.

This is a book that anticipates the contemporary economy not by predicting its technologies, but by diagnosing its psychological substrate. Manu asserts that the success of innovation lies not in what it does, but in what it enables people to become. It is the transformation of the self, not the performance of the object, that generates lasting value.

From Device to Behaviour Space
Manu’s critical insight is deceptively simple: products are no longer tools—they are platforms for behaviour. The iPhone, for instance, is not just a phone. It is a behavioural interface, an object that invites discovery, serendipity, and the pleasures of interaction. It is a space that users make their own, not merely through functionality, but through emotional resonance.
This reframing culminates in Manu’s concept of the Behaviour Space: a dynamic ecosystem where action, motivation, and meaning converge. Within it, value is no longer tied to utility or ownership, but to the quality of the experience and the degree of personal transformation it affords. Business, in this view, is not about delivering efficiency, but about cultivating possibility.

The Originality of the Work
The originality of Behaviour Space lies in its synthesis of strategic foresight, human psychology, and experiential design. Manu replaces the language of functionality with that of engagement. He develops a new grammar for value—value places, compelling experiences, strategic dissonance, and play value—to articulate how organizations can build relationships that are not only useful, but emotionally meaningful and culturally relevant. He draws a powerful distinction between space and place: space is what is given; place is what is made through engagement. A feature becomes valuable not when it exists, but when it becomes a site of identity, memory, and desire. This redefinition of value is particularly crucial in today’s platform economy, where personalization and interaction shape not only satisfaction, but monetization.

What Manu Understood Before It Became Obvious
Long before the mainstream embrace of UX design, gamification, and experience platforms, Manu understood that play is not frivolous—it is fundamental. He recognized that pleasure is the metric of engagement, and that businesses would compete less on features and more on the depth and richness of experience they offer. This was a radical departure from feature-led innovation models.

He also foresaw that future-proof organizations would not be defined by technology, but by their capacity to unlearn, reframe, and design from the inside out. For Manu, the most important strategic question is not “what can we make?” but “what behaviours can we make possible?” And more provocatively: what experiences can we make desirable enough to be repeated?

A Model with Lasting Influence
Since its publication, Behaviour Space has informed practice across design education, strategic foresight, marketing innovation, and digital transformation. It has been adopted into graduate curricula in design thinking and behavioural economics, and its frameworks are widely cited in research on platform engagement and customer experience.

Crucially, Manu’s ideas have found fertile ground in organizations designing human-centred ecosystems—from platform businesses to service design agencies, from educational technology start-ups to health and wellness platforms. His vision of business as a creator of culture—not merely as a producer of goods—resonates in sectors where participation, identity, and meaning are now core to value creation.

Why It Remains Urgently Relevant
The contemporary business landscape—marked by attention economies, generative technologies, and behavioural datafication—only heightens the relevance of Behaviour Space. In this context, the strategic value of a product lies in its ability to generate transformation through interaction. The work offers a foundational toolkit for navigating this terrain with foresight, sensitivity, and imagination.
Manu’s enduring lesson is that innovation cannot be reduced to what is visible or measurable. It resides in the felt experience of change, in the internal transformations that occur when users discover pleasure, purpose, and presence in their interactions with the world.

Business as Behavioural Architecture
Behaviour Space ultimately proposes that the most resilient and resonant organizations are those that view their mission as creating new standards of living. Businesses must learn to operate as architects of behaviour, designing spaces that invite discovery, foster agency, and deliver not just functionality—but meaningful experiences of the self.
In this light, the future of innovation is not about better tools. It is about better questions, deeper engagements, and richer possibilities for becoming. For those shaping the next generation of business models, learning environments, and digital ecosystems, Manu’s work remains a generative resource—both a compass and a challenge.

Innovation as Behaviour, Not as Process
When Alexander Manu published Disruptive Business: Desire, Innovation and the Re-Design of Business in 2010, he provided what remains one of the most conceptually ambitious and enduring reframings of innovation in the modern business literature. This is a book that does not merely call for change—it interrogates the very foundations of whyinnovation happens, what enables it, and more crucially, what it serves. In this work, innovation is not defined as a new product, service, or market model. It is defined as the moment of behavioural transformation—a shift in how individuals live, act, and desire in the presence of new possibilities.

Manu’s central thesis—that innovation is a behavioural outcome, not a technical one—remains both timely and transformational. Disruption, in this framing, does not occur when something new is introduced into the marketplace. It occurs only when that new thing changes what people do, and more deeply, who they believe they can become.

What Manu Got Right
In many respects, this work laid the conceptual groundwork for an entire generation of strategic thinking around design, behaviour, and foresight. Long before behavioural design became standard practice and user-centred innovation was widely institutionalized, Manu insisted that organizations must orient themselves not around problems to be solved, but around desires to be expressed. The insight here is profound: desire, not need, is the origin of innovation.

He recognized that digital platforms were not merely technological infrastructures but behavioural platforms—spaces for identity formation, self-expression, and participation. From early analyses of YouTube as a medium of meaning-making, to a prescient reading of the iPhone not as a product but as a cultural artefact that reshaped behaviour, Manu demonstrated a rare ability to see the emergent economy of participation years before it entered mainstream discourse.

The Originality of the Work
The originality of Disruptive Business lies in its elegant inversion of dominant logics. It is not tools that extend human capacity, but humans who extend their will to become through tools. Technology is not a driver, but a mirror of motivation. Innovation is not an outcome of investment or process—it is the evidence of human aspiration made material.
This rethinking becomes operational in Manu’s layered model of the desire > want > need progression. In this view, value creation is not about satisfying surface-level requirements but about enabling people to manifest their aspirational identities. Businesses do not serve markets; they serve transformation. The successful enterprise is no longer the one that best manages supply chains, but the one that best understands what people want to become, and builds the artefacts, spaces, and systems to support that becoming.

A Legacy Still Unfolding
In the years since its publication, Disruptive Business has quietly become a cornerstone in innovation pedagogy and behavioural strategy. It has shaped curriculum in strategic foresight and design management programs across Canada, the United States, and Scandinavia. Its behavioural lens is frequently referenced in workshops focused on design ethics, future-making, and organizational transformation.
More recently, the book’s insights have found renewed relevance in platform design, behavioural data strategy, and the expanding discourse on algorithmic culture. The rise of experience ecosystems—from Spotify to TikTok to generative AI interfaces—has underscored Manu’s foresight that the core business of the 21st century is not production, but participation.

In particular, his notion that “the success or failure of any product, service, or technology is directly related to its capability to be media for the satisfaction of human motivation” has been adopted in thinking around value ecosystems, ambient computing, and adaptive interface design.

Relevance in Today’s Economy
In a time marked by AI, generative media, and digital identity construction, Disruptive Business reads less like a retrospective and more like a roadmap. As leaders wrestle with questions of relevance, loyalty, and engagement, Manu’s behavioural framing offers a language that transcends metrics and delivers meaning.
His call to design with, rather than for, users resonates with contemporary conversations about ethical design, co-creation, and inclusive innovation. More importantly, his demand that organizations recognize ambiguity not as a problem but as a core function of strategy is more urgent than ever.

Designing for Desire
Disruptive Business is not a book about forecasting technological trends. It is about seeing clearly that all innovation is about people—their motivations, their dreams, and their desire to become something more than they are. It challenges practitioners to move beyond superficial engagement with markets and enter into a deeper conversation with human intention.
For educators, designers, strategists, and business leaders, this book offers more than a theory. It offers a conviction: that businesses capable of understanding the grammar of desire will not merely survive disruption—they will become its authors.

Design Reclaimed from Function to Meaning
In The Big Idea of Design, Alexander Manu presents a provocative and enduring redefinition of design—not merely as a method of form-giving, but as a relationship of purpose, rooted in the social, emotional, and experiential context of human life. Originally written as a series of articles for the magazine Studio in 1994, it was published in book form in 1998. This work serves as both a historical marker and a forward-looking manifesto. It represents a foundational moment in Manu’s oeuvre, introducing the frameworks, vocabulary, and ethical stance that would come to characterize his later writings on behavioural economies, disruption, and imagination.

The book’s central claim is that good design does not begin with the product—it begins with the Big Idea: the original social or cultural purpose that gave rise to the object, service, or experience. Everything else—form, function, interface, even experience—is secondary. This reverses decades of design discourse that privileged aesthetics, engineering, or market fit, reminding us instead that design is a medium of cultural transmission, a tool not for problem-solving alone, but for meaning-making.

What Manu Understood with Uncommon Clarity
Well before terms like “design thinking” and “human-centred design” entered popular usage, Manu articulated a vision of design as inherently relational and ethical. His model—mapping the continuum from Product → Experience → Event → Big Idea—provides a framework that is still profoundly relevant in today’s world of interaction design, experience economies, and platform architectures.

He saw with rare foresight that many contemporary products—Walkmans, digital watches, automatic coffee makers—succeeded in function but failed in meaning. They disrupted the social rituals that once defined our relationship with music, time, or coffee, turning collective experience into isolated consumption. For Manu, these were not technical failures—they were failures of design intention.

His critique remains deeply resonant: design that forgets its social origin loses its power to elevate, to connect, to humanize. Manu’s assessment of the Walkman as “a product that goes against the idea of music” may appear counterintuitive, but within his framework, it is entirely coherent: music as a shared emotional event becomes individualized, privatized, diminished.

Originality: Context as the Core of Design
What distinguishes The Big Idea of Design from design manuals or trend reports is its epistemic shift. Manu introduces the concept of the Conceptual Framework—the intellectual and emotional ecosystem in which a product exists, shaped by memory, culture, ritual, and imagination. This context is not an afterthought; it is the design itself.

He offers the now-iconic metaphor of the ToolToy: a fusion of utility and pleasure, necessity and desire. In this model, products must serve both the function of tools and the emotional intelligence of toys. Form, he argues, does not follow function—form follows spirit. A knife, depending on its context and intention, can become either a weapon or a utensil. The same physical object, transformed by its use, becomes a different design entirely.

Impact and Contemporary Relevance
Though first published over two decades ago by the Danish Design Centre, The Big Idea of Design has enjoyed a quiet yet powerful influence across Europe and North America. Its ideas have shaped the thinking of a generation of design educators and foresight practitioners. The work has been referenced in curriculum design, innovation labs, and critique methodologies, especially in Scandinavia and Canada, where the integration of social ethics into design practice has become a hallmark of institutional training.

In today’s design landscape—marked by ubiquitous computing, AI-generated interfaces, and behavioural datafication—the book’s call to return to the experiential and cultural purpose of artifacts has never been more urgent. It offers an ethical orientation that is conspicuously absent from much of contemporary design practice, where the tool (technology) too often supplants the story (purpose).

A Manifesto in Disguise
Perhaps the most enduring contribution of The Big Idea of Design is that it positions the designer not as a technician or stylist, but as a cultural author, responsible for shaping relationships, rituals, and realities. It demands a higher standard: that a product should not merely work, but matter.

This is not a nostalgic plea for simplicity, but a challenge to reintegrate depth, complexity, and care into the act of design. By inviting readers to see design as analogous to storytelling, cuisine, and cinema, Manu elevates it into a multidimensional practice that speaks across the senses and across time.

Conclusion: Design as a Living Dialogue
More than a theory, The Big Idea of Design offers a way of thinking—one that invites professionals, educators, and creators to slow down, look deeper, and design with presence. In an age defined by speed, disruption, and ephemerality, this book’s greatest gift may be its insistence on meaning as the measure of success. Manu’s vision remains a call to restore soul to strategy, humanity to innovation, and imagination to design. It is, in every sense, a book ahead of its time—and one that still speaks, urgently, to ours.