The Dream Cafe: Lessons in the Art of Radical Innovation

UUNDERSTANDING

One of Einstein's insights that we take to heart at The Dream Café is:

‘If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.’

We realize that daring to quote this maxim will mean that we will immediately be hoisted by our own petard for the more obscure sections of this book. All we can say in our defence is that at least we tried hard to understand first before we then tried hard to explain some pretty complex ideas.

So try as hard as we might, we recognize that defining the future requires a preparedness to grapple with abstract, obscure and even esoteric concepts, as the artist Paul Chan recently wrote in Selected Writings 2000–2014: ‘A new world demands a new language and we are all equidistant from the potential to imagine a new language for this new world’.

Understandings

Remember – if radical innovation was easy, everyone would be doing it. So one way of reading this list is to treat it as a rehearsal. You can use it to prepare yourself for the fact that once you press the disruption button your biggest problem will be deciding which concepts to run with rather than how to create them.

We have attempted to create a list here that captures some ‘understandings’ essential for successful brand innovation. It is a very long list and by no means comprehensive; but our strategy here is merely to get you thinking:

• Understanding that your future ...