On the face of it Apple has one innovation problem that it needs to overcome – find a new category-busting product like the iPhone. Not so easy, of course. But the intervention of hedge fund manager David Einhorn, mad at the company’s inability to leverage value from its $137 billion cash pile, tells us that its innovation problems are significantly bigger.

It needs to re-instantiate the idea that it could be worth a $1 trillion.

Instead Apple is a company whose current, core customer-centric mission has acted like a dehydrator in the company’s idea closet. Its insistence on a very narrow definition of what it does has made it impotent to use that money. It’s creativity is all but dried up.

Contrast that with Google, which also has a cash pile, though more modest in scale. Driverless cars (where I have voiced skepticism) and Glass are great forward thinking projects. The company just needs more of them. And the reason is that the very long term form of innovation is back in fashion – or will be soon.

I said a couple of days back that companies need to function on three levels with their innovations – innovate every day, innovate in the long term (the new 10 – 30 year cycle) and innovate in the process of creating wealth by changing how an enterprise looks, feels and functions.

Like Google, Apple has its lean innovation programs fine tuning and improving its internal processes. But I think Apple misses the point of what an enterprise is for because of its narrow product and brand focus. Apple needs to think like a global leader – the global leader in tech.

We face two simultaneous problems in the global economy. The first is the accumulation of capital for non-productive uses – Bain reports that by 2020 the total of financial assets in the world will be $900 trillion, $300 trillion more than today, and its effect is constantly to threaten a surge in non-financial asset prices such as commodities. Apple is a symptom of that problem hoarding cash it is too scared or unimaginative to spend.

The second is the growth of a global middle class that will be extremely resource hungry and that is causing enormous structural problems – or opportunities – because of the pace of development. These are Apple‘s future customers.

I got talking recently about this, and the role of the USA, to Bhaskar Chakravorti, senior associate dean of International Business & Finance at The Fletcher School at Tufts University. Bhaskar also runs the Institute for Business in the Global Context.

“America’s future actually depends on a global system capability in innovation,” says Bhaskar, “that is deep, long-term investment in solving problems on a systemic basis.”

There’s some sense in applying this obligation also to corporations. As Bhaskar points out 40% of global GDP comes from emerging markets, yet only 10% of US GDP comes from these areas. America is letting opportunity slip by.

Of course to invest long term in distant markets was previously a development role – Governments went out the solve the problems of poor countries. But in the 21st century we are not talking about poor countries. The fast evolving economies that cover over half the world’s populations have problems created by economic bottlenecks – air quality, water access, inadequate infrastructure and so on.

In the west, our needs are fundamentally solved. Where we experience poverty it is a distribution and opportunity issue.

So what’s that to do with Apple? If you believe Apple‘s only role is to create bight shiny objects then nothing, of course. But prior to its obliteration by Apple, mobile phone giant Nokia was a major player in the development of emerging market infrastructure, applications and capability raising. Take a look at this 2008 post on Nokia in Africa.

Apple, like the US Government, needs a new approach to the fast developing world and needs a vision of what it means to be the world’s leading tech company, what it means to take responsibility in the communities it profits from as well. But that doesn’t preclude further profit. It needs a 20 year vision of what it will do to solve problems and make money here.

All this will help anchor Apple in more hearts and minds and help anchor Einhorn’s assertion that it could be go to a $1 trillion capitalization and beyond.

Clearly to do that it needs friends.

I suspect the one idea of enduring value that came out of last week’s debate about driverless cars was that the Google version would be perfectly attuned to the new mega-cities, preventing congestion and improving air quality at the same time as accelerating mobility.

Apple has the cash and ingenuity to play an important role in balanced development but to do so it needs to think 10 – 30 years ahead, beyond devices, beyond its current brand and perhaps also beyond its well-healed customers of today.

You might also like to read this brief account of Google’s innovation layers.