For most of the industrial era, companies have predominantly asked themselves how to use the resources available to them more efficiently — in other words, how do we produce basically the same kinds of goods and services only faster, better and cheaper? But in today’s value-based economy, companies increasingly need to ask themselves how to use the resources available to them more innovatively — “How do we leverage existing skills and assets in different ways, different contexts or different combinations, in order to create new opportunities for value creation and growth?”

The Power of Patterns in Innovations

At its very essence, all human thought is based on patterns. We use this innate ability of pattern recognition all the time, without even being aware of it, to identify faces, forms, voices, language, words, musical melodies, images, stories, concepts and so on.