Visibility

This chapter focuses on the role of imagination in innovation. Innovators are visionaries: they envisage novelty earlier than others; they identify and capture cues that may lead to incremental as well as radical changes. From Newton’s apple in 1687 to today, the challenge remains of how to develop the capacity to have a “vision”. Was it mathematics or the universe that came first? This was the unresolved debate of the eighteenth century. Fantasy overcomes the limits of gravity by exploring the repertoire of what is possible. Following Italo Calvino’s Six Memos, we underline the importance of developing a ‘pedagogy of imagination’ to educate students throughout their journeys: imagination—and therefore creativity—is essential during transition phases; referring to the past to create the future may turn out to be detrimental for human and social progress. Calvino (Invisible Cities. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978) wrote, ‘Memory truly matters if it binds together the imprint of the past and the project of the future, if it enables one to do without forgetting what one wanted to do, to become without ceasing to be and to be without ceasing to become’.