The Dream Cafe: Lessons in the Art of Radical Innovation

PREFACE

The Dream Café offers an introduction to the lessons that brand owners can learn in a way that deliberately defies logic – that is, by emulating the way that the radical creative practitioners we commonly called avant-garde broke with convention, dismissed the naysayers and invented the future. The fact that artists and creative thinkers, from a wide range of backgrounds, could change the way we all think and do by initiatives that began with interdisciplinary conversations around a café table provides compelling evidence for a new way of engaging with the urgent task of brand innovation.

In order to practise what we preach we have avoided a conventional structure for our book and created an A to Z list of characteristics, actions and qualities that distinguish business that thrive from those that merely survive (and sometimes, don't), which is more akin to a series of ‘Menu Cards’. We believe that in a ‘time-short’ world the insights we offer are best read on the run, much in the way that you would snack at a café. When the experimental French film maker Jean Luc Godard was asked about his apparent lack of interest in conventional narrative principle, he corrected his interviewer by pointing out that his films do have ‘a beginning, a middle and an end’, but ‘not necessarily in that order’. It's much the same with this book: we want you to engage with it in ‘bite-sized ...