Want to Market Innovation? Then Channel Your Inner Sci-Fi Writer

Meghan Krenselewski
MarketInnovationNew

In today’s marketplace, innovation isn’t an outlier; it’s the baseline expectation. And with the often mind-bending applications that many technologies offer, it can be tougher than ever to find the right way to communicate the full potential of a new idea. 

How, for instance, would you even go about explaining the MIT Media Lab’s Mediated Matter group? Its website contains the following description: 

“The Mediated Matter group focuses on Nature-inspired design and design-inspired Nature. We conduct research at the intersection of computational design, digital fabrication, materials science, and synthetic biology, and apply that knowledge to design across scales — from the micro scale to the building scale.” 

Initiatives like these at MIT are not only real; they are innovations in the true sense of the word. The trouble is that it’s tough to get past the far-fetched description. What does it mean? What does this look like? How are investors or customers supposed to  a future made possible by this technology? 

The answer lies in imagination. 

Imagination is the Innovator’s Ultimate Storyboard 

Imagination does not mean “make believe” or made-up things. Imagination is the ability to see and explore real things that can exist and are about to become possible. It’s the companion to a company’s or innovator’s vision — like a giant whiteboard on which you can depict a future world and that helps you write the narratives and scenarios that bring that world to vivid life. 

Imagination trumps the uninspiring “smarter, better, faster, stronger” narrative on which most marketing tactics rely. So what if my network runs 2.3% faster? It might be true, but resistance to change is a formidable foe. Any inertia against even simply considering a new service or product must be overcome by something bigger than a few numbers on a spreadsheet. And that “something bigger” is stepping into a fascinating, irresistible new world made possible by your innovation. 

Imagination Design Must Become a New Marketing Discipline 

The past is rarely a precedent for what comes next. Savvy marketers must  from backward-looking, case study-based narratives to “future studies.” 

To do this, we need a visualization and storytelling discipline that paints a vivid picture of a world that doesn’t yet exist, but is still grounded in your audience’s understanding of their current and potential realities. 

In literature and film, the genre is called science-fiction or sometimes speculative fiction. In our work, we call it Imagination Design or Storyworld. It’s a discipline that brings the future into focus by bringing it to life in macro and micro story formats..  

Good science fiction doesn’t draw audiences in through simply coming up with far-fetched worlds or new alien species. It pulls their audience to a new, yet familiar world that still connects to the human experience in some way. The same essential questions must be addressed: What is the central problem at stake in this world, and how will humanity rise to the challenge? 

Imagination is the flavor of creative energy we need in this era of increasing possibility. As communicators, we must wield this future-seeing power, guiding both the big ideas and their attendant communications to fruition. Along the way, Imagination Design requires us to be: 

  • Students of the future who can track and anticipate where key markets and businesses are heading. 
  • Insightful directors who can create detailed scenarios that show the potential impact of an idea. 
  • Expert change managers who can map the path from the present condition to the future destination. 
  • Fluent speakers in the language of the heart and interpreters of our deepest human motivations 

 
How are you already using imagination and sci-fi inspiration in your marketing strategies? 

Imagine It and They Will Come — How Strong Worldbuilding Invites Collaboration and Engages Investors  

In one of our recent posts, we talked about how imagination is the key to communicating the full impact of an innovative new idea. Through something we call Imagination Design, marketers can channel their inner sci-fi writer to unfold powerful storylines about the future of powerful new innovations. 

The key to success for Imagination Design is the magnetic pull of a rich new reality that plays out novel possibilities, rising problems, and creative solutions. Imagination Design creates a fully realized world to observe and explore populated by fascinating people, futuristic places, intriguing things, powerful actions, and meaningful relationships, all tied together with a shared language of new terminology and lore.  

Think of it in the same way large institutions like universities create a future vision for capital campaigns. They invite you to think: What does the campus of the future look like? And then they help you see it. What the buildings look like, how students walk and interact within the space, how the current campus architecture and flow of life will be impacted.  

And perhaps most importantly, it naturally begets the question: Where will I factor into this exciting new world? 

Invite Collaboration and Foster Powerful Creativity 

If you want to achieve a goal — any goal — you start by envisioning the outcome with your core team. To be a true source of motivation, the goal should be precise and alive: not a set of inert images, but a vibrant scene that’s teeming with emotions, victories, hopes, life. Imagination Design can help you use this pre-conceptualization of an end goal to inspire investors and employees. 

By conjuring an enticing and vivid endpoint, you can inspire your workforce to invest in your idea’s success. And by infusing that destination with deep individual meaning, you make it easier to see a definitive path from the present to the future, and to explain and assign the individual actions that will be needed to get there.  

A person’s confidence and motivation are tied to their ability to see the outcomes of their efforts. And when this outcome is clearly imagined, employees are then free to exercise the full force of their creative powers to achieve it. Imagination is a natural resource: a deep well of energy and potential that, when tapped, can fuel not only hard work, but a deeper drive to turn a dream into reality.  

What are some ways that you’ve seen strong worldbuilding motivate your team? 

Insights

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Free Tool: Creative Concepting Card Deck

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Podcast: How to Craft a Standout Creative Idea  

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