Density, if you're wondering, is always a ratio of "something" per unit of "something else".
You probably recognize such a construction as a ratio.
Value is a more complicated idea:
- It's in the eye of the beholder (I value it, even if you don't)
- It's subject to bias (one in hand vs two in the bush)
- It's susceptible to the effects of utility compression (more is better, until it's not)
- It's what you're willing to pay for (willingness and capacity and capability are different ideas)
- It advantages cybernetics (the outcome is more valuable than the collection of inputs)
- It's usually 'most bang for the dollar', not necessarily lowest price. To wit: "best value"
- It may have a wholly social dimension, as value in the public sector, which may be completely subjective
- It may combine, or entangle, with the closely related concepts of "quality"
- It's a lot of different stuff, all at once
Connect the dots: if density is a ratio (it is) and value is a lot of different stuff, what then is the combo: "the density of value"?
Like value itself, there's more than one idea:
- Pack it all in: How many different things, each separately valuable, can be packed into one container, device, or app, to wit: valuable 'items' per 'container'
The smart phone is the poster child for this one: phone, camera, scanner, database, browser, network connector, mobile operating system, myriad apps, compass, geolocator, clock, timer, and endlessly more it seems - Compress it by transforming it
Though vinyl is coming back a bit, cubic mountains of vinyl are obsolete, but the music plays on digitally, but in a lot less real estate
I still buy printer paper, but a lot less! I 'print' to pdf and electronically store it (and retrieve it) more efficiently and more densely (hundreds of searchable pdf's on my smart phone rather than file cabinets full)
My smart phone is no longer a 5-pound brick
From vacuum tubes, to transistors, to dual-inline, to integrated circuits, I can build an amplifier on the head of a pin; everything needed is just denser!
From millions of miles of telephone cable, to microwave telephone relays, to microwave cellular, the density of calls per unit of bandwidth is dramatically more.
And the information density in a communication channel is approaching the Shannon limit of irreducible entropy. To wit: Transfer the entropy elsewhere! Claude Shannon would be pleased no doubt that so many are working on that very idea.
The question
As you create value, are you creating world class value density?!
Because 'value density' itself is valued!
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