Possibility thinking: lessons from breakthrough engineering

Purpose – The ability to see new possibilities is fundamental to creating innovative designs – but what do we know about state-of-the-art possibility thinking? The purpose of this paper is to look at this topic, which the strategy field has largely ignored in favor of analytics, by examining a selection of breakthrough engineering projects. Out of these, the paper aims to draw eight different ways of illuminating new possibilities – challenging, connecting, visualizing, collaborating, harmonizing, improvising, re-orienting, and playing – and discuss what each of these might look like if applied to business strategy. Design/methodology/approach – The paper explores eight different engineering projects that are regarded as especially innovative. It then explores the lessons of these for business strategists. Findings – The paper finds that innovative business strategy development has many parallels with engineering approaches. Practical Implications – Some of the advice resulting from this perspective includes: take an absolute industry “truth” and turn it on its head; look outside the boundaries of your usual world; put the numbers aside and get some images down on paper; find a partner and work together; push yourself beyond the “workable” and try to get to “intriguing;” act as if necessity truly was the mother of invention; formulate a different definition of the problem; and go out and conduct some low cost experiments instead of forming a committee. Originality/value – The creative front-end of the process of innovation is revealed to be more than a mysterious “black box.” Instead, eight systematic ways to generate possibilities, using concrete examples from both the world of engineering and business, are described to help managers begin to see new possibilities for themselves.