How to harness the competitive advantage of new ideas for business leaders

The Imagination Machine, published in June, explains how business leaders can keep the power of imagination alive in their organizations and harness it systematically to ensure future success. Drawing on the experience and insights of CEOs across several industries, as well as lessons from neuroscience, computer science, psychology and philosophy, Reeves and co-author Jack Fuller, an expert in neuroscience, explore the mechanics of imagination and lay out a process to enable organizations to become more imaginative.

In the webinar, Reeves says that imagination is essential to enable societies to tackle the big collective challenges that the world faces. “Climate change is such a hard problem that we need to be extremely imaginative – and collectively imaginative – in order to solve it,” he notes.

But imagination is also more important than ever for businesses, because the competitive advantage of new ideas now fades much more quickly than in the past. A company with a performance edge over its competitors in the 1980s could expect this to last 10 years, whereas now it could only hope to enjoy this advantage for one year, he says.

And while AI can take over many routine tasks, it cannot replace the human capacity for empathy and imagination. Machines are already better than humans in many areas of correlative thinking and will eventually be better at causal thinking, but only humans are capable of counterfactual thinking, he notes.

And yet Reeves says 80% of CEOs are not confident that their companies have the ability to systematically harness the power of imagination. This is often because they are locked into ways of doing things that have made them successful in the past, and complacency sets in: “The paradox is that if you succeed in finding something which is new to the world and which the world needs, and you become successful, you become a prisoner of the mental models that underpin your past success and can become unable to see the need for the new or the specifics of the new.”