I clearly remember when, about twenty years ago, I would frequently hear the admonition “Marketing is no longer enough.” It was no longer enough to promote our products and position them properly in the market; it was also becoming crucial to improve our offer by providing our clients with distinctive value. Marketing continued to be important, but it was no longer the only thing we needed to do well; we had to take it one step further and innovate.

We are currently at the brink of a similar pivotal moment that is pushing innovation to the background. In this article, I will describe the reasons why innovation is no longer enough and explain the next step that we must take.

Today, we have access to more knowledge and more technologies than we could have even imagined not too long ago. We have access to all the information we could need—literally at our fingertips. Most of us have mobile phones with processing capabilities millions of times greater than the supercomputer aboard Apollo 11, the NASA spacecraft that carried the first man to the moon. More innovative products have been launched on the market over the past ten years than were created in the preceding hundred years. There is no doubt that technology and innovation have been the main engines boosting our society during the twenty-first century.

Humanity, however, is going through a paradoxical situation. Despite all the technology and innovation in the world, we continue to face all types of challenges: climate change, social inequality, armed conflict, and much more. Are we truly moving forward as a civilization?

To try to answer this question, it would be good to recall one of the lessons Margaret Mead, the famous anthropologist, taught us. One of her students once asked her the following question during a class: What was the first indication of human civilization? Any of us might have thought that it would be discovering a spoon, a bowl, or some type of “technology” from that time. However, Dr. Mead surprised everyone with her reply. According to her, the first sign of a civilized society was a naturally healed human femur.

Dr. Mead explained that a wounded animal in the wild would be doomed to die, for it could no longer hunt for food or protect itself from predators. Finding a naturally healed human femur would indicate, however, that the person who had fractured their leg had survived, due to having been helped by other individuals. She explained that “helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts.” In other words, the advancement of our civilization is not a matter of technology, but rather of mindset. We evolve as a civilized species when we change the way we see the world and act to improve it.

Going back to the challenges humanity faces, it’s important, then, to see things differently. I often like to quote Peter Diamandis in this regard, when he says that “The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest market opportunities.” So, not only is it possible to improve the world while improving our business, but the best way to boost our business is precisely by trying to create a better world.

Each day, more organizations define a purpose (in addition to their vision and their mission) to express how they want to positively contribute to the world. We are also seeing communities like BCorp or Purpose Alliance emerge in line with this trend, since it’s been proven that the positive impact generated by purpose-driven organizations is twofold: it impacts the world and their own business.

Google is one example. Its purpose is “to digitize and democratize access to information,” which over time has become a purpose-driven ecosystem that has created around itself a series of initiatives that attempt to solve the challenges separating reality from the organization’s purpose (just as I detailed in my post called “Industries Create Scarcity, Purpose Generates Abundance”). Tesla, whose purpose is to “accelerate the world’s transition towards a sustainable energy model,” is another example, and it has also become an ecosystem in which a series of products and services coexist, having reached a market capitalization greater than all of its competitors combined. How has Tesla achieved this in only a few years?

To better understand what is happening, let me present and describe the Positive Impact Pyramid, which you can also find in my book Positive Impact. Resembling the pyramid of the hierarchy of human needs known as Maslow’s Pyramid, but applied to organizations, the Positive Impact Pyramid presents a series of evolutionary levels that an organization can reach in order to maximize its results and its positive impact. It is essential to attain each level in order, so you can only climb to the next level if you’ve first achieved the previous ones, as explained below in greater detail.

The basis of any organization is to have a good product that offers real value to its customers, for which it must innovate. But as I’ve explained earlier, this will not be enough to take that organization to its maximum potential, since there are still several levels above Product that must be achieved. As with Maslow’s Pyramid, we can only ascend to the next level if the previous ones have been reached. Therefore, once we have a good product, we will be able to generate benefits (Profit) that will allow us to be sustainable as an organization. However, not only must we be sustainable at an economic level, we all know that nowadays we must also be socially (People) and environmentally (Planet) sustainable; this triple sustainability is what will allow us to operate an organization today without consuming the resources of tomorrow. In fact, going back to all those challenges we face, it is no longer enough to be sustainable; the important thing is to improve the world in which we live. That last level, Purpose, is precisely what will guide our actions so as to generate a positive impact on the world, and at the same time, on our business.

In short, only those organizations that have a good Product will be able to generate Profit, which will allow them to be sustainable at a social (People) and environmental (Planet) level. And only those organizations that operate sustainably can claim to be purpose-driven, thus creating a Positive Impact on the world and on their own business.