Why Today’s Businesses, And Their Innovation Attempts, Fail Life

Rethinking what it means to innovate in an age of collapse and interdependence

Our choice: a regenerative world versus our currently extractive one?

What if the future of innovation wasn’t just faster, cheaper, more efficient -
but instead, more alive?

Innovation has long been seen as the engine of progress. From Silicon Valley to global boardrooms, it's been synonymous with disruption, scale and sleek new solutions. But while we’ve optimized for speed and economic growth, we’ve ignored more foundational questions:

What does life need to thrive, and how might innovation serve that?

The truth is, most innovation today operates within a narrow frame. Even the most celebrated methods, like design thinking, agile, and lean startup, are rooted in a worldview that treats humans as central, nature as optional, and extraction as inevitable. They solve for symptoms but rarely ask whether we’re solving the right problems to begin with.

We don’t lack ingenuity, we lack alignment: with life, with ecology, with the systems that sustain us.

Innovation at the End of a Line

We live on a planet whose boundaries are being pushed to collapse. The dominant innovation model that optimizes products, services, or platforms for markets was built for a linear economy: extract, produce, discard. Even when we iterate or pivot, we’re often just optimizing the same system that got us here.

It’s time to ask:

What kind of innovation actually regenerates the systems we depend on?

From Problem-Solving to Pattern-Seeking

At Carom, we believe the future of innovation isn’t about designing for users in isolation. It’s about designing within ecosystems. Innovation that restores rather than depletes. That listens to more-than-human voices. That operates not just with purpose, but with planetary intelligence.

We call this shift Regenerative Innovation - not as a buzzword or trend, but as a redefinition of what innovation is for.

Regenerative Innovation doesn’t start with market need.
It starts with the living systems we belong to.

Our Provocation

What if your product design was informed by a watershed?
What if your business model was accountable to a forest?
What if your strategy sessions began with the question:
What does life need here, and how might we serve it?

These are not abstract ideals. They are the next frontier of innovation.

We’re building tools, frameworks and more provocations to help you and your organization design into that future. Starting soon, we’ll start releasing them to help innovators, leaders and entrepreneurs design not just for humans, but for living systems.

Be part of the redesign.

Subscribe below to get early access to the them, and join the movement toward regenerative innovation.

 jeremy@carom.com
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