We live in the Age of Knowledge, which is impelling us towards the Age of Imagination. The technological wave rises and with it rises a wave of change that will affect both the economy and society. When these two waves will reach the coast where knowledge meets ignorance, and how to ride them, are questions that require us to imagine the future. We must, therefore, embark on the vessel of imagination, leaving behind us the baggage of what we know and understand. Imagination is not just the springboard for ideas; it also acts to connect ideas in different ways that may blossom in the garden of an entrepreneurial renaissance. Symbols, metaphors and concepts that belong to our tacit knowledge come to light in our memory. It is from here that the imagination draws its lifeblood, broadening our horizons, inducing us to interact with others who may be the bearers of other cultures. Are we ready to engage in an imaginative learning process to join business with innovation and art? Are we prepared to design a wide-open white space where the actors of entrepreneurship, innovation and art can generate a constructive tension that will sweep away what appears to be mutual antagonism or incompatibility?
We live in the Age of Knowledge, which is impelling us towards the Age of Imagination. The technological wave rises and with it rises a wave of change that will affect both the economy and society. When these two waves will reach the coast where knowledge meets ignorance, and how to ride them, are questions that require us to imagine the future. We must, therefore, embark on the vessel of imagination, leaving behind us the baggage of what we know and understand. Those who give more weight to the imagination and less to knowledge are becoming intolerant of traditional systems of education that tend to stifle imagination with their teaching methods, examinations and specializations.
Imagination is not just the springboard for ideas; it also acts to connect ideas in different ways that may blossom in the garden of an entrepreneurial renaissance. Symbols, metaphors and concepts that belong to our tacit knowledge come to light in our memory. It is from here that the imagination draws its lifeblood, broadening our horizons, inducing us to interact with others who may be the bearers of other cultures. Exposed to digital technologies, we realize that technology alone is not enough and that alone we can do little. Are we ready to engage in a creative learning process to join business with innovation and art? Are we prepared to design a wide-open white space where the actors of entrepreneurship, innovation and art can train together and so generate a constructive tension that will sweep away what at first glance may appear to be mutual antagonism or incompatibility?
The artistic spirit translates into innovations that are works of art which (excuse the pun) change the state-of-the-art of the time. To understand the world of interaction between business (B), innovation (I) and the arts (A), we must be aware that they do not resemble motionless stars whose relative positions appear fixed on the celestial sphere, but events that occur and change incessantly. Those who interweave humanistic culture and familiarity with quantum physics will be better able to understand the meaning of that complex process which is the encounter between entrepreneurial and artistic activity from which innovations emerge that break with tradition. Those who, from another perspective, focus on art as coexisting with craft will perceive in entrepreneurship a return to Renaissance humanism after the years of mass production which reduced the functions of human beings to those of machines and when, in our present time, artificial intelligence is ‘humanizing’ machines and challenging our roles and actions.
The tension that causes the bifurcation between art and business, between creativity and innovation, has its source in vertical rather than transversal learning processes. If we look to examples from history, it could be argued that this artificial process of division is contrary to the natural inclination of human beings. Samuel Morse (1791–1872), for instance, was a painter as well as an inventor and innovator. In our own time, we might think of rock musicians working, for example, in Berlin who have found a fertile meeting ground for culture and business in their musical innovations with digital technology specialists.
As an agent of change unrestricted by psychological reservations, art can break with the tradition of incrementalism (an incremental innovation being one that leads to us to do better what we have learned to do well). Through continuous improvement, ‘incrementalists’ win market share quarter after quarter. For them, the warning bells sound when the ‘innovationists’ – artists who dream and ideate – introduce radical innovations that will predominate for decades.
Overview
When we remove the veil that renders our vision blurred and therefore approximate, we are able to perceive only a few aspects of the reality that surrounds us. A borderless prairie stretches out before us, on which business, innovation and art run not like strangers and rivals, but criss-crossing and embracing one another. This is more than a (re-)union for dialogic exchange. It is, above all, an endless series of epiphanies and intuitions that lead to a higher level of awareness. The fields of ideas that alter the common sense of things and generate a future become more vibrant and more fertile. Counter-cultural firms design and build ideas factories featuring the play of symbolic analysts, characters in a new commedia dell’arte with creativity at centre-stage. This is how innovations blossom, which like all new creatures appear at first to be ill-shaped, as Francis Bacon (1561–1626) might say. Like ugly ducklings, they are doomed to clash with those who have to keep the ‘house in order’ – like the manager within the boundaries of received knowledge. Entrepreneurial imagination is the way out of old ideas, but the path is littered with obstacles because, as John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) argued, ‘the difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas, as in escaping from the old ones’ (Keynes, 1936, p. viii).
Venturing onto that borderless prairie is a highly personal action of the individual that relates doing with attentive thinking, criticizing and cultivating. There is no map to show the way; there is no predetermined direction of travel. Those who venture carve out their own paths, appreciating the transdisciplinarity and beauty of imperfection – as the German performance artist Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) advocated. These explorers will pose questions for themselves and they will find the answers through imagination and creative ignorance. As highlighted in The Role of Creative Ignorance (Formica, 2015), creative ignorance comes after the knowledge accumulated through study and experience, and struggles against mastered knowledge maps and mental structures. Such exploration precedes and heralds the coming together of artists with scientists, researchers, innovators and business creators. At Columbia University, Stuart J. Firestein, Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences, is an explorer. He claims that overcoming the limits of the known requires an ability to remain in the realms of the unknown, which, to adapt a saying of Confucius, can be likened to finding a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat. Hence Firestein’s idea:
for an entire course devoted to, and titled, Ignorance. A science course [...] in which a guest scientist talks to a group of students for a couple of hours about what he or she doesn’t know. (Firestein, 2012; see also Formica, 2015)
Freethinkers, non-conformist artists and craftspeople have shown that they are particularly attracted by the fascination of experimentation. As Jenny Uglow (2002) recounts brilliantly, in the second half of the eighteenth century an informal group of experimenters, including gifted amateurs, provincial manufacturers and non-academic practical people, few with a university education, founded the Lunar Society of Birmingham. It was so called because the meetings, which took place between 1765 and 1813, were held on the Monday nearest to the full moon. Driven by curiosity in the workings of the natural world, Lunar Society members were responsible for a wave of innovation set in motion by the discovery of oxygen (Joseph Priestley, 1733–1804), the fine-tuning of the steam engine (James Watt, 1736–1819) and the modern commercialization of pottery (Josiah Wedgwood, 1730–1795). Their achievements included fossil classification, telescope manufacture and the creation of sparks of electricity. Lunar Men lived art in its broadest sense, encompassing the natural world. Uglow (2002) writes:
In the time of the Lunar Men science and art were not separated: you could be an inventor and designer, an experimenter and a poet, a dreamer and an entrepreneur all at once without anyone raising an eyebrow […] And when people spoke of the ‘arts’, they did not mean only the fine arts but also the ‘mechanic arts’, the skills and techniques in agriculture, say, or printing. (pp. xi and xiv)
As Guillet de Monthoux (2004) reminds us, avant-garde painters such as Fernand Léger (1881–1955), Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), Juan Gris (1887–1927), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Georges Braque (1882–1963) conducted experiments in the field of non-Euclidean geometry. The proximity of art to business was the subject of exploration and experimentation by artists whose apprenticeship took place in the cradle of craftsmanship. Thus, the futurist Fortunato Depero (1892–1960), with his early experiences as an apprentice to a marble worker, came to draw graphic symbols and design typefaces for industrial products. Starting from experimentation in the art of the miniature, the carpenter Ole Kirk Kristiansen (1891–1958) laid the foundations of the Lego Group, the Danish toy manufacturer, transforming artistic creation into enormously successful industrial production. These are just two examples among many of the intertwining of art, crafts, innovation and business.
The opening of minds and arms to effect the mutual embracing of business, innovation and art leads to disturbance, anxiety and discomfort among the champions of the status quo – the kind of agitation we may feel when we contemplate, for example, the metaphysical strangeness of Giorgio de Chirico’s (1888–1978) painting The Disquieting Muses (1916–1918). Business, innovation and art are three disquieting muses moving in time and space for – as Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c4 BCE–65 CE) argued:
nothing can be made without time [… and] if there be no place where a thing can be made, it will not be made. And motion too; nothing is either made or destroyed without motion. (Seneca, c65 ce/1979, Vol. 1, p. 451)
Innovators and innovation stakeholders populate the earth. The minds, hearts, passions, imagination and creativity of innovators are the ovens in which ideas are melted and then remodelled into a wide variety of forms. Among the pure forms there is a grey area where they can cross and mix. Thus the ancient art of regular, elegant and ornate writing meets with the automated machine that performs mathematical calculations and processes data. Influenced by the classes of the Trappist monk and calligrapher Robert Palladino (1932–2016), Steve Jobs (1955–2011) combined the art of calligraphy with computing when he incorporated a variety of attractive fonts into his original Mac. This led him to regard Apple as a technology enterprise that went hand in hand with the liberal arts and humanities (Lehrer, 2011).
Occupation, commerce and venture (business); restoration, renewal and change (innovation); skills resulting from learning or practice, methodology for making or effecting something, or a particular type or form of something (art): delving into the meaning of business, innovation and art captures their close connection. This, coincidentally, is conveniently represented in the acronym BIA – from left to right it tells us that ‘Business Is Art’ and, from right to left, that ‘Art Is Business’.
The golden encounter is an innovation. Those who promote it should be aware that at the time we act we are propelled towards new spaces. It is the same innovator who is obliged, metaphorically, to rearrange the clock and move in a different direction because, as the French pioneer of venture capital Georges Doriot (1899–1987) said, ‘Nothing works the first time’.
When is the right time to act? Once we are prepared to do so carefully and without haste. If we are obliged to move quickly, we must never fail to act appropriately – that is to say, with in-depth thought. The dispatch of efficient and effective business, coupled with the slowness of careful reflection: this is the recipe for innovation.
Staying comfortably with the old style of doing business does not allow us to look beyond the visible horizon. Innovation that breaks down the status quo requires us to abandon the past in an organized way. ‘Organized abandonment’, as Peter Drucker (1909–2005) called it (Drucker, 1999), is that same mental exercise the ancient Romans referred to as festina lente.
According to Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), the Roman Emperor Augustus (63 BCE–14 CE), who wanted to change the face of Rome for the better, recommended in his official letters to his ministers the solicitude of action together with the slowness of reflection. The combined need for prompt action and slow reflection is a legacy attributed to great leaders. To be successful, innovation must run at a speed which enable...
