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Umair Haque’s Awesomeness Manifesto has been making the rounds lately, proclaiming that “awesome is the new innovation”. Haque’s hypothesis is that innovation is too costly. Innovation brought us feature-laden products that quickly fail or are obsolete the next year. Innovation brought us the poor banking instruments that helped cause the financial crisis. Innovation needs to make way for awesomeness.

What is awesomeness? (emphasis mine)

Awesomeness happens when thick — real, meaningful — value is created by people who love what they do, added to insanely great stuff, and multiplied by communities who are delighted and inspired because they are authentically better off. That’s a better kind of innovation, built for 21st century economics.

And wouldn’t you know it? The first pillar of awesomeness is ethical production:

Innovation turns a blind eye to ethics — or, worse, actively denies ethics. That’s a natural result of putting entrepreneurship above all. Buy low, sell high, create value. That’s so 20th century. Awesome stuff is produced ethically — in fact, without an ethical component, awesomeness isn’t possible. Starbucks is shifting to Fair Trade coffee beans, for example. Why? Starbucks isn’t just trying to innovate yet another flavour of sugar-water: it’s trying to gain awesomeness.