10 Ways Your Imagination Can Help Your Business Grow

Forget what you learned in elementary school. Daydreaming is good. In fact, your imagination could be the key to your success as an entrepreneur.

Piero Morosini, the author of “Seven Keys to Imagination: Creating the future by imagining the unthinkable and delivering it” (Marshall Cavendish, April 2011), believes new ways of thinking and using your imagination can help drive your success. He gives BusinessNewsDaily 10 reasons why imagination can benefit small businesses.

• Think trade-on rather than trade-off. Successful entrepreneurs are trade-on minded: they go about life with the mental eyes of being, acting and gaining much more with a lot less. A trade-on mindset quite naturally unleashes your imagination into conceiving great and positive visions of the future for your business.
• Use your customer’s imagination. The big idea that will revolutionize your market space is already in your customers’ minds. All you need to do is empathize — see the world and imagine the future through your customers’ eyes.
• Turn your visions of the future into your personal mission. The value of a vision for your business — no matter how inspiring and imaginative — is zero. Your vision will start to change the future of your business only after you commit passionately and wholeheartedly to its realization.
• Put the future of your business in your customers’ minds. Encourage your best customers to design prototypes of their own wild ideas. Then, help them turn those radical ideas into great products, services or processes for everyone.
• Build a core team of believers. Take the time to find a few people who are very different from you in every respect except for one: that they passionately share your vision of the future and are committed to realizing it. History demonstrates that a core team of committed believers is what makes any small business take-off.
• It’s not about thinking out of the box, it’s about experiencing a bigger box. Imagination flows best when triggered by strong emotions. Engaging in new experiences — starting with putting yourself inside your customers’ shoes, or becoming a customer in your own market space — will create the emotional platform for your imagination to take-off in new, exciting directions.
• Remember that a great vision of the future is only the first step. Move fast to build physical, tangible prototypes of your great ideas. Then try those prototypes with real customers to improve and turn them into great products or services.
• Changing the future of a small business is like making a movie. You just have to imagine,  or embrace, a great story and write a fantastic script. Everything else — the actors, set, editing, distribution, and production, and even the direction — can and should be done by other people. Your job is to find, inspire and orchestrate them.
• To change the future of your small business is to imagine a much greater one.  Don’t be afraid of expressing your inner dreams and visions of the future. It is only when you communicate your dreams to others with authenticity that you will be on your way to a greater, bigger future for your business.
• The future is what you imagine, not what others tell you. Avoid blindly following other people’s analysis of future. Recent history shows that the likelihood they’re right is less than 2 per cent. Look around and trust your observations. Use your imagination to build the future rather than studying other people’s unlikely predictions.

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