The Dream Cafe: Lessons in the Art of Radical Innovation

TTRIPPING

The Urban Dictionary defines tripping as: ‘To travel with the goal of meeting local people, as popularized by social network.’ They offer other examples of usage that amused us, such as: ‘We went tripping through Europe last summer and met some locals who invited us to their house parties and took us to cool underground bars.’

We have to admit that we wondered for a bit about the folks who compile these definitions. They had one we really liked: ‘Going tripping beats being a tourist.’

Brands can learn a lot about the art of innovation from the various actions, practices, processes and provocations inherent in the term ‘counter-culture’. The term is used to define a complex, multi-faceted and loosely connected phenomena that emerged in the United States of America during the late 1940s and began to dissolve and dissipate during the 1970s (or not, depending on how you interpret history).

We have already discussed the counter-culture's influence on Apple's evolution – and much of the importance lies in the word ‘counter’. The Dream Café is fond of this word, because it summarizes the need for brands and the businesses that own them to start acting and thinking counter intuitively. Creating your own counter-culture begins with questioning everything that you thought you knew and deliberately and perversely evolving and testing concepts that your intuition tells you that ...