How to Use Value Innovation to Open New Markets

Contributor - Prashant Subhedar
May 23, 2025
6 min read

It begins, like most good business parables, with shoes.

Two salesmen are dispatched to a far-off land. One sends back a grim telegram: “Hopeless. Nobody wears shoes.” The other? Ecstatic: “Glorious opportunity. Nobody wears shoes yet!”

That old chestnut has survived not because it’s accurate, but because it’s revealing. It captures the very essence of value innovation: seeing markets where others see absence, hearing possibility in silence, and realizing that sometimes, the smartest thing you can do is stop competing and start creating.

Red Oceans Are for Sharks. You’re Not a Shark.

Most businesses, when facing saturation or price pressure, do what any cornered creature might: bite harder. They double down on features, marketing budgets, and discounting wars with the vigor of a caffeinated gladiator. But the truth is, the fastest way to lose a market is to fight for it on someone else’s terms.

“Real innovation doesn’t roar. It reroutes.”

This is the foundational logic behind value innovation, not to out-muscle the competition but to out-maneuver them. Or better yet, to make them irrelevant. And this shift doesn’t belong to Silicon Valley alone. From bureaucratic halls to informal economies, value innovation is popping up in places that might surprise you.

Government: Bureaucracy? Or Market Whisperer?

Let’s start with the unlikely innovator: the state.

India’s UPI-Unified Payments Interface was not cooked up in a startup lab but by the National Payments Corporation of India, a public infrastructure initiative. It didn’t try to replicate Stripe or PayPal. Instead, it asked a brilliantly subversive question: what if anyone, even someone with a feature phone, could send money like they send a text?

Suddenly, your chaiwala, your cabbie, your cousin in a Tier-3 town, all had access to instant, cashless payments. UPI didn’t win the game. It changed the game so completely that fintech startups now scramble to play by its rules.

Further north, Estonia; a country with fewer people than Mumbai’s railway system flipped the script with its e-Residency program. Don’t have a business-friendly tax regime? No problem. Estonia invited entrepreneurs from across the globe to become digital citizens. It wasn’t policy. It was product.

Corporates That Asked Weird Questions

Now enter the suits. Big corporations aren’t exactly known for disruption, but every now and then, they get it gloriously right.

Take Ford, for instance. In an era when cars were for the silk-hatted elite, Henry Ford wondered, “What if we made them so cheap that my employees could buy one?” The Model T was more than a car. It was the industrial revolution on wheels. It took America from horse-drawn to horsepower.

Fast forward a century, and Tata did something similar with water. They noticed a painful truth; millions of Indian households lacked access to clean drinking water. Instead of launching a sleek filtration app (as would happen today), they developed Tata Swach, a water purifier that worked without electricity, using rice husk ash. It democratized water purification across all levels of society.

“Innovation doesn’t always look like disruption. Sometimes, it looks like common sense finally given a budget.”

Designers Who Redrew the Map

Design agencies are often the quiet choreographers of market creation. They enter after the engineers, before the marketers, and ask the most dangerous question of all: WHY?

Consider Bang Design’s collaboration with Embrace. In neonatal wards across the developing world, babies were dying, not from disease, but from cold. Incubators were too expensive, too power-hungry, and not available where they were needed the most, village public health centers. So, Embrace, with Bang Design, built a low-cost, intuitive infant warmer. It saved lives. It reached hundreds of thousands and continues to do today.

Or Pearlfisher’s work with Help Remedies. Walk down any drugstore aisle and you’ll be assaulted by medical jargon. Help, instead, offered you a box that said, “Help, I have a headache.” Simple. Disarming. Designed like an iPod, marketed like a human.

Then there’s the OXO Good Grips story: Smart Design observed that arthritis sufferers struggled with basic kitchen tools. They shifted the focus from designing for chefs to those who couldn’t grip the utensils well. They designed them for comfort. Rubberized handles, intuitive form, total dignity. What began as an inclusive design became the default standard.

The Informal Sector: Scrappy, Smart, and Years Ahead

Here’s the part where Silicon Valley often misses some of the best innovations that come from the street.

Take Go-Jek in Indonesia. What began as a way to hail informal motorcycle taxis turned into a full-blown ecosystem. The app went beyond offering rides; it wove together a constellation of services already present in Jakarta’s streets. It digitized the chaos, yes but more importantly, it respected it.

Or Brazil’s favelas, where entrepreneurs repurpose everything from solar panels to satellite dishes to deliver internet, energy, and goods where infrastructure fails. These aren’t case studies in hustle. They’re masterclasses in design under constraint.

“Most markets aren’t untapped. They’re misread.”

What All of These Had in Common

They weren’t trying to make something cooler. They were trying to make something work.

The formula, if you’re looking for one, is insultingly simple:

Start with a constraint.
Add listening.
Remove assumptions.
Ask better questions.

And don’t benchmark. That’s for people who want to be incrementally better. If you want to be categorically different, ignore the category.

What Bang Design Brings to the Table

At Bang Design, we don’t think of innovation as a brainstorming session or a sprint. It’s a lens, a way of seeing. We ask where people are being underserved, misrepresented, or ignored entirely. We look for the strange workarounds, the taped-together hacks, the inefficiencies people have normalized.

And then we ask: what if the market had been designed for them in the first place?

We’ve worked on industrial tech, digital platforms, social goods, and future-focused products, and each time, the challenge wasn’t just to stand out. It was to stand in someone else’s shoes, in markets where nobody’s worn shoes yet.

If you’re tired of fighting for market share and ready to invent a market story, let’s talk.

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