Imagination as a Competitive Advantage
Publicado: 20 Ago 2022, 03:30
If companies are serious about increasing the productivity of their innovation initiatives, then they must get serious about cultivating and nurturing imagination among their employees. There is a reason why a leading innovator like The Walt Disney Company, gives its animators and artists the Latest Mailing Database esteemed title of “Imagineer.” Disney’s corporate culture emphasizes and continues to tap the imaginations of all its employees. Not surprisingly, Disney is not only consistently ranked as a top innovative company, but continues to be a major force in transforming the entertainment industry. Imagination is the “what” or “what if” that enables us to seek out new business opportunities or foresee tomorrow’s challenges, while creativity is the “how” or “how to” that guides our approach to known problems. What Now? What Next? To boost innovation, companies must invest in the building and nurturing of their imagination capabilities.
Here are three simple recommendations your company can implement tomorrow: Don’t be in a hurry to find the one, right answer. Make a fetish of asking many different “what if” questions that will yield entirely new vistas, and scenarios. For example, a July 2014 U.N. report predicts that the proportion of the world’s population living in urban areas will increase from 54 to 66 percent by 2050. Imagining the implications of this on housing, infrastructure, transportation, energy, education and health care can yield a number of potential innovation opportunities that subsequently can be creatively developed and commercialized. Abandon the KISS principle and complicate the stew. Customers’ lives are rarely simple, and never one-dimensional. Actively seek and embrace cognitive diversity; materially different ways of perceiving, filtering, and interpreting reality Forget hierarchies and titles.
Engage the entire company through creative play. An imagination capability must be a corporate asset—not just an individual property—for it to effectively fuel innovation initiatives. Creative play can go a long way in developing and cultivating an imagination capability, because employees, regardless of their educational background and titles, love and know how to play. Just like a spacecraft goes through a series of firing sequences before launch, innovation needs a series of corporate capabilities to fire in the right order for it to take off. Although the two are linked, imagination must come before creativity. When implemented in the proper sequence, the two function more effectively, and innovation wins. This is a lesson all proponents of Big Data must learn if they want their initiatives to bear fruit.
Here are three simple recommendations your company can implement tomorrow: Don’t be in a hurry to find the one, right answer. Make a fetish of asking many different “what if” questions that will yield entirely new vistas, and scenarios. For example, a July 2014 U.N. report predicts that the proportion of the world’s population living in urban areas will increase from 54 to 66 percent by 2050. Imagining the implications of this on housing, infrastructure, transportation, energy, education and health care can yield a number of potential innovation opportunities that subsequently can be creatively developed and commercialized. Abandon the KISS principle and complicate the stew. Customers’ lives are rarely simple, and never one-dimensional. Actively seek and embrace cognitive diversity; materially different ways of perceiving, filtering, and interpreting reality Forget hierarchies and titles.
Engage the entire company through creative play. An imagination capability must be a corporate asset—not just an individual property—for it to effectively fuel innovation initiatives. Creative play can go a long way in developing and cultivating an imagination capability, because employees, regardless of their educational background and titles, love and know how to play. Just like a spacecraft goes through a series of firing sequences before launch, innovation needs a series of corporate capabilities to fire in the right order for it to take off. Although the two are linked, imagination must come before creativity. When implemented in the proper sequence, the two function more effectively, and innovation wins. This is a lesson all proponents of Big Data must learn if they want their initiatives to bear fruit.