The Dream Cafe: Lessons in the Art of Radical Innovation

HHABITAT

We named our agency The Dream Café because we believe that the places and processes that determine where and how you work have a crucial impact on the quality and relevance of your contribution. Moving on from the definition of socialization and collaboration locations as the ‘third space’, we have designed The Dream Café innovation strategy around our theory of the ‘fourth space’. There can be little doubt that the spaces in which we work, rest and play have a profound effect on the quality of our engagement.

The concern to encourage innovation activity in business has led to the prioritization of people and processes rather than investment in thinking about the way that places can revolutionize the way that people and think and create. The lack of intelligent and usefully innovative thinking in the design of the spaces that we occupy to develop the art of radical innovation may well be a by-product of the fact that many businesses are still unable to abandon their traditional assumptions about efficiency as an outcome of distraction minimization. This legacy has a tendency to undermine the achievement of breakthrough innovation and that is why we have evolved the concept of The Dream Café as a distinctive fourth space strategy. We deliberately encourage our clients to augment their internal strategies by externalizing their need to dream and prototype innovation into ...