by kulor on 5/9/2024, 10:13:29 AM
I run a SaaS in the healthcare space and an unforeseen impact is how digitising paper-based business has a transformative economic and lifestyle improvement for the owners.
On a call with an early customer, they were nearly in tears of happiness when they realised they could free up a bedroom full of filing cabinets in their house. They continued to say how it was saving them hours of admin over their weekend to spend more time with their family. I won't pretend this was anything unique to our product offering, just the process change they capitalised on that freed them up to have a better quality of life.
I don't think I could have engineered this outcome pre facto, it's a byproduct that emerges with useful tools and process changes.
Every product or service has an impact externality depending on what it can be applied for. A person using the product can decrease or increase well-being of parts of the society. It may happen unintentionally (by design) or on purpose, if the person is aware of the impact they make.
Depending on what effect dominates overall, we can roughly define three types of products by the social impact sign.
The first type are products with a negative externality. Using a product for its default purpose makes public living worse overall. For example, drugs, WMD.
The second, products with a neutral externality. The majority of FMCG can be included: a product itself is "not good" or "bad" but is able benefit good or bad actors regardless.
Third, the products with a positive externality. The ones, that increase the common good just by design.
As a special case, there are universal positive externality products. Those cannot be used to harm any social group (i.e. very unlikely or useless for such a goal) and increase the public good the more people use them.
And there are all kinds of in-betweens on this spectrum.
How do you think, are there products with universal positive externality? What are they?
I operate the terms "good" and "bad". It might be an oversimplification. You can apply your understanding of what is generally good or bad for people.