Imagination an underrated business asset
Despite research showing that organisations that value and harness imagination are amongst the highest earning companies, across the board, imagination ranks last on a list of 15 workplace characteristics valued by employers – which leads us to the question – is imagination Australia’s most underrated business asset?
There is no debating whether or not knowledge is king; however, knowledge only reaches its full potential when its full value is being used – which is where we believe imagination comes into the picture.
What use is knowledge without the freedom to imagine new ways to deliver innovative products, services and solutions? And what role does imagination play in learning and retaining knowledge in the first place?
In Australia, I am the Director of the Canon Business Imaging team and we recently published the report, Imagination for Business – taking an in-depth look at the role that imagination plays in business. The report details results of a survey of 400 senior executives from organisations throughout Australia, as well as an experiment supervised by the University of New South Wales (UNSW) investigating the efficacy of imagination as a learning tool.
Professors John Sweller, Paul Ayres and Slava Kalyuga, from UNSW, who designed the experiment, proved that in a corporate setting, when presented with a procedure or concept to learn, imagining the procedure or concept achieves significantly better learning outcomes than conventional studying. The imagination group in the experiment improved their results by 63% compared with 29% for the study group.
That imagination didn’t make the top five in workplace characteristics in the survey of senior executives came as no big shock; however, the fact that it was ranked last is cause for concern as we believe imagination plays a very important role in business and is key for organisational success. We would also argue that using imagination to conceptualise the creative or innovative output – the vision – is an important part of the business improvement process.
At Canon Australia, we partner with innovative Australian organisations, delivering customer-focused print and document solutions that go beyond technology. We work with our customers to help their people be more productive, to increase visibility across their print and document processes, and to help them achieve more return on their technology investments. Imagination is at the core of who Canon is and what we offer and we believe other businesses have the opportunity to also tap into its potential.
