What should a team do when there is no problem to solve, only a future to imagine?

In this episode of Arkaro Insights, Mark Blackwell talks with Thomas Gillier, Associate Professor at Grenoble Ecole de Management and scientific coordinator of the ANR InnovAI project. Their subject is visionary concepts: ambiguous yet coherent pictures of possible futures from which concrete innovations can later grow.

Thomas shares findings from his award-winning study with Victor Seidel, Akin Kazakci and Gérald Piat, published in the Academy of Management Discoveries. Ten teams had 90 minutes to design a visionary concept for a museum of Antarctica. The researchers mapped every idea as a node in a network. They found that the most visionary teams avoided early fixation, linked their most original ideas together and selected as they went. The ideas that survived into the strongest final concepts were the most connected ones.

In this episode:

  • Why visionary concepts are deliberately ambiguous, yet still need coherence
  • Why expert panels could judge originality and feasibility but could not agree on customer value
  • How to use a visionary concept as a stepping stone, backcasting to innovations you can sell now
  • How the facilitator's role changes when a workshop is about imagining the future
  • What Thomas calls the "archaeology of the future", studying how Nokia imagined the smartphone


    About Thomas Gillier
    Thomas Gillier, Associate Professor at Grenoble Ecole de Management, studies innovation management and creativity, with a particular interest in how ideas emerge, evolve and are elaborated over time. His research examines these processes in close collaboration with technology-intensive organisations such as Renault, STMicroelectronics and CEA.

  • Links
    • The paper: Gillier, T., Seidel, V.P., Kazakci, A. and Piat, G. (2024), "Crafting Future Innovations: The Network Structure of Ideas for Visionary Product Concepts", Academy of Management Discoveries, 10(4), 611–629. https://doi.org/10.5465/amd.2023.0120







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