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.