This article was first published in Harvard Business Review
Growth is no longer easy to come by. Investing in it is more costly, the globalization premium is stalling, and ecological pressures can limit growth potential. In this environment, companies seeking growth must develop innovative offerings to expand demand. And yet, large companies are apt to forget their imaginative origins as they prioritize optimizing existing products and business models over creating new ones.
Can companies recover their imagination? BCG’s Martin Reeves and Adam Job believe they can by using a six-step cycle: embrace anomalies, treat assumptions as choices, collide ideas with reality, learn to spread ideas, create evolvable scripts, and start all over again.
Gone are the days when companies could focus on creating a single new idea, which, if successful, gave them a durable platform for growth. Organizations need to sustain imaginative practices because they must increasingly rely on new ideas to create sources of demand.