The Imagination Machine: How to Spark New Ideas and Create Your Company's Future (Martin Reeves and Jack Fuller)

The Imagination Machine: How to Spark New Ideas and Create Your Company's Future, by Martin Reeves and Jack Fuller, is a call-to-action for businesses to harness imagination to drive growth. Reeves and Fuller target the leadership of established, larger businesses, arguing that a lack of innovation will stymie the long-term success of a business. As technology evolves ever more rapidly, the authors advocate a change in thinking to better harness the creative power that a business's employees likely have.

The book presents a toolbox of suggestions to engage the workforce - things like “playtime” within the office where small teams of people work on various projects, brainstorm, and collaborate on ideas to foster new ways of thinking. The authors cite real-world examples of how things that we take for granted came about from playtime. Google Maps is one such example!  A chunk of the book dives into how companies should take advantage of artificial intelligence to help their innovation and imagination efforts - citing examples of companies that are taking greater advantage of AI technology to help craft news stories or create predictive forecast models - and how AI can likely help us come up with many ideas in the future.

Reeves and Fuller have a well-researched and thoughtful vision for better creativity in large companies. While The Imagination Machine definitely has a specific target niche, both business students and leaders in established companies that need a creative boost may be wise to read the book.

MY RATING - 3.5