There’s No Such Thing as a Vegetable Lasagna

Lasagna – a quintessential dish of the Italian cuisine. Originally from the Emilia Romagna region, which is really the home of pasta.

It includes all the best of the regional cuisine: tasty pasta, creamy bechamel sauce, and flavorful ragú bolognese. This last is a meat sauce.

With so many elements it is typical to find many variations for each element of a lasagna; in particular the meat sauce will have a different secret ingredient or step from one kitchen to the next. And this is how you have variations on lasagna.

Typically, a “vegetable lasagna” dish includes the lasagna pasta: wide flat sheets of pasta used for layering. This is where the similarities end.

Variations versus New Findings

It is ok to take something that has always been used in one way, and find a completely new way to use it. We have all read the meme about how life went from “don’t accept rides from strangers and don’t talk to strangers on the internet” to “summon a ride from a stranger using the internet”.

When you create something completely new, even if it is using a tool that came before, it is ok to make it your own. The best innovation is spurred by imitation.

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Imitation

It is quite easy to start a business. What is difficult is to grow a business. Finding an already established market is helpful.

Improving the services in an existing market is the most effective way to start a new business.

Professor Oded Shenkar describes imitation in business as “an intelligent search for cause and effect”. Examining what already exists and considering ways it can be changes, modified, and improved in order to better serve a certain market, expand it to a new market, or a plethora of other reasons, is the result of that “intelligent search”.

Innovation

Now put your mark on it. Share your “intelligent search” findings with the world. What is new, improved, different, unique?

And brand it. Your finding, your effort, your idea deserves your name on it.

Is your change a variation? Or a whole new product? If you are adding a new secret ingredient to one third of the parts of a lasagna, it is probably still a lasagna with its own innovation. If you are using a sheet of pasta for a whole new dish, then it’s not a vegetable lasagna: it’s a name we don’t even know yet.